Water quality and its interlinkages with the Sustainable Development Goals

Interlinkages among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lead to important trade-offs and synergies among the goals and their underlying targets. The aim of this paper is to review the role of water quality as an agent of interlinkages among the SDGs. It was found that there are a small number of explicit interconnections, but many more inferred interlinkages between water quality and various targets. A review of case studies showed that interlinkages operate from the municipal to near global scales, that their importance is likely to increase in developing countries, and that new SDG indicators are needed to monitor them. The analysis identifies many different SDG target areas where a combined effort between the water quality community and other sectors would bring mutual benefits in achieving the water quality and other targets

Yellow sea mediated segregation between North East AsianDryophytesspecies

While comparatively few amphibian species have been described on the North East Asian mainland in the last decades, several species have been the subject of taxonomical debates in relation to the Yellow sea. Here, we sampledDryophytessp. treefrogs from the Republic of Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the People's Republic of China to clarify the status of this clade around the Yellow sea and determine the impact of sea level change on treefrogs' phylogenetic relationships. Based on genetics, call properties, adult morphology, tadpole morphology and niche modelling, we determined the segregated status species ofD.suweonensisandD.immaculatus. We then proceeded to describe a new treefrog species,D.flaviventrissp. nov., from the central lowlands of the Republic of Korea. The new species is geographically segregated fromD.suweonensisby the Chilgap mountain range and known to occur only in the area of Buyeo, Nonsan and Iksan in the Republic of Korea. While the Yellow sea is the principal element to the current isolation of the three clades, the paleorivers of the Yellow sea basin are likely to have been the major factor for the divergences within this clade. We recommend conducting rapid conservation assessments as these species are present on very narrow and declining ranges

A new multi-metric approach for quantifying global biodiscovery and conservation priorities reveals overlooked hotspots for amphibians

Undocumented species represent one of the largest hurdles for conservation efforts due to the uncertainty they introduce into conservation planning. Until the distribution of earth’s biodiversity is better understood, substantial conjecture will continue to be required for protecting species from anthropogenic extinction. Therefore, we developed a novel approach for identifying regions with promising biodiscovery prospects, linked to integrative conservation priorities, which we illustrate using amphibians. Our approach builds on previous estimates of biodiscovery priorities by simultaneously (1) considering linkages between spatio-environmental variables and biodiversity, (2) accounting for the relationship between past sampling deficits and future biodiscovery potential, (3) incorporating a priori knowledge about global species distribution patterns, (4) addressing spatial autocorrelation in community composition, and (5) weighting theoretical undocumented species by their predicted levels of conservation need. Using boosted regression trees and 50km2 map pixels spread across the global range of amphibians, we identified several regions likely to contain many undocumented amphibian species and conservation needs, including humid portions of sub-Saharan Africa, portions of South American Atlantic forests and undersampled portions of the Amazon, Andes Mountains, and the interior of East Asia. Top-ranked ecoregions were mostly concentrated in tropical portions of South America and Africa, both for undocumented species richness and for integrative undocumented amphibian conservation needs. However, high-scoring pixels tended to be widely distributed across different ecoregions for both biodiscovery scoring approaches. Our integrative biodiscovery scoring approach is the first to enable the targeting of specific regions for biodiscovery efforts based on explicit, holistic estimates of the conservation importance of such efforts, and therefore represents an important step forward for documenting and preserving earth’s biodiversity

Is ultra-violet fluorescence a trait related to breeding in the Mongolian racerunner (Eremias argus; Lacertidae, Reptilia)?

Ornamental traits such as ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence and reflectance can provide honest signals indicating the bearer’s condition as a potential mate. UV fluorescence is widely found in nature and used for multiple functions, such as indicating female maturity in arachnids and acting as a signal enhancer in many insects. Lizards can display a broad range of colours, but the function of some of their ornamental traits remains unclear. Here, we report the presence of UV fluorescence in female Eremias argus specimens, a small lizard ranging across Mongolia, China and the Korean Peninsula. Based on our observation, combined with the literature on the breeding behaviour of the species, we provide two hypotheses, assigning the use of UV fluorescence to: 1) an indicator of females body conditions and 2) signal efficacy backup. To verify our hypotheses, we suggest a protocol with three serial trials under low light and enhanced UV light conditions.

Bayesian Recommendations and Utility Elicitation with Intensity of Preference Statements

International audienc

Feature Selection Algorithm based on Random Forest applied to Sleep Apnea Detection

This paper presents a new feature selection method based on the changes in out-of-bag (OOB) Cohen kappa values of a random forest (RF) classifier, which was tested on the automatic detection of sleep apnea based on the oxygen saturation signal (SpO2). The feature selection method is based on the RF predictor importance defined as the increase in error when features are permuted. This method is improved by changing the classification error into the Cohen kappa value, by adding an extra factor to avoid correlated features and by adapting the OOB sample selection to obtain a patient independent validation. When applying the method for sleep apnea classification, an optimal feature set of 3 parameters was selected out of 286. This was half of the 6 features that were obtained in our previous study. This feature reduction resulted in an improved interpretability of our model, but also a slight decrease in performance, without affecting the clinical screening performance. Feature selection is an important issue in machine learning and especially biomedical informatics. This new feature selection method introduces interesting improvements of RF feature selection methods, which can lead to a reduced feature set and an improved classifier interpretability.status: publishe

Seoul, Keep Your Paddies! Implications for the Conservation of Hylid Species

Biodiversity is plummeting worldwide, and the major causes of such decline include habitat degradation and climate change. While cities do contribute to the negative impact to the environment, they can also serve as strategic centres for conservation programs. Sites qualifying as biogeographic islands within metropolitan Seoul were studied for the occurrence of two hylid species: the endangered Hyla suweonensis and the abundant H. japonica. This study demonstrates that neither habitat diversity nor surface area, but solely the occurrence of aggregated rice paddies is a requisite for H. suweonensis, hypothetically due to its strict breeding requirements. On the contrary, H. japonica occurrence was not affected by any of these factors, and all types of habitats studied were adequate for this species. The presence of an endangered species within the boundaries of one of the most populated metropolises suggests a strong natural resilience, which should be enhanced with appropriate actions. We emphasize that the management plans therein can, and should, be used as the first step in the conservation of H. suweonensis in metropolitan Seoul