Summer habitat use and movements of invasive wild pigs (Sus scrofa) in Canadian agro-ecosystems

Resource selection informs understanding of a species’ ecology and is especially pertinent for invasive species. Since introduced to Canada, wild pigs (Sus scrofa Linnaeus, 1978) remain understudied despite recognized negative impacts on native and agricultural systems globally. Elsewhere in North America, pigs typically use forests and forage in agricultural crops. We hypothesized Canadian wild pigs would behave similarly, and using GPS locations from 15 individuals, we examined diel and seasonal resource selection and movement in the Canadian prairie region. Forests were predominately selected during the day, while corn (Zea mays L.), oilseeds, and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) were predominately selected at night. Forests and corn were consistently selected throughout the growing season.Wetlands and forests showed greater use rates than other habitats, with evident trade-offs as crop use increased with the timing of maturation. Activity was consistent with foraging in growing crops. Results indicate diel patterns were likely a function of short-term needs to avoid daytime anthropogenic risk, while seasonal patterns demonstrate how habitats that fill multiple functional roles——food, cover, and thermoregulation——can be optimized. Understanding selection by invasive species is an important step in understanding their potential environmental impacts in novel environments and informs their management

Use of Acceleration and Acoustics to Classify Behavior, Generate Time Budgets, and Evaluate Responses to Moonlight in Free-Ranging Snowshoe Hares

Technological miniaturization is driving a biologging revolution that is producing detailed and sophisticated techniques of assessing individual behavioral responses to environmental conditions. Among the many advancements this revolution has brought is an ability to record behavioral responses of nocturnal, free-ranging species. Here, we combine captive validations of acceleration signatures with acoustic recordings from free-ranging individuals to classify behavior at two resolutions. Combining these classifications with ~2 month-long recordings, we describe winter time budgets, and responses of free-ranging snowshoe hares to changing moonlight. We successfully classified snowshoe hare behavior into four categories (not moving, foraging, hopping, and sprinting) using low frequency accelerometry, with an overall model accuracy of 88%, and acoustic recordings to three categories (silence, hopping, and chewing) with an accuracy of 94%. Broad-scale accelerometer-classified categories were composed of multiple fine-scale behavioral states with the composition varying between individuals and across the day. Time budgets revealed that hares spent ~50% of their time foraging and ~50% not moving, with most foraging and feeding occurring at night. We found that hares adjusted timing of activity in response to moon phase, with a 6% reduction in foraging and 30% reduction in traveling during the night when the moon was full. Hares compensated for this lost foraging time by extending foraging into the morning hours of the following day. Using two biologging technologies to identify behavior, we demonstrate the possibility of combining multiple devices when documenting behavior of cryptic species

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The past, present, and future of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS)

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven standard for the organization of data and metadata from a growing range of neuroscience modalities. This paper is meant as a history of how the standard has developed and grown over time. We outline the principles behind the project, the mechanisms by which it has been extended, and some of the challenges being addressed as it evolves. We also discuss the lessons learned through the project, with the aim of enabling researchers in other domains to learn from the success of BIDS

New Breeding Record for Merlin (Falco columbarius) in Southwestern Yukon

On 3 May 2016, we observed two Merlins (Falco columbarius) copulating near Hungry Lake in southwestern Yukon. We recorded Merlins frequently from May until the beginning of July and observed them defending the area from Common Ravens (Corvus corax) on two occasions, an activity indicative of a nesting pair. This is the first breeding record for Merlins in southern Yukon, as previous records have documented the breeding range only in central and northern parts of the territory. Here, we summarize historical sightings and breeding reports throughout southern Yukon since 1975 and fill a gap in the breeding range of this species

GeoAI and spatiotemporal epidemiology to forecast flavivirus transmission

Collaborative research project investigating flavivirus risk to livestoc

WNV Projects Data Hub

WNV data, code, and other resources used across different West Nile project

Ocean warming alters the distributional range, migratory timing, and spatial protections of an apex predator, the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier)

Given climate change threats to ecosystems, it is critical to understand the responses of species to warming. This is especially important in the case of apex predators since they exhibit relatively high extinction risk, and changes to their distribution could impact predator-prey interactions that can initiate trophic cascades. Here we used a combined analysis of animal tracking, remotely sensed environmental data, habitat modeling, and capture data to evaluate the effects of climate variability and change on the distributional range and migratory phenology of an ectothermic apex predator, the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier). Tiger sharks satellite tracked in the western North Atlantic between 2010 and 2019 revealed significant annual variability in the geographic extent and timing of their migrations to northern latitudes from ocean warming. Specifically, tiger shark migrations have extended farther poleward and arrival times to northern latitudes have occurred earlier in the year during periods with anomalously high sea-surface temperatures. A complementary analysis of nearly 40 years of tiger shark captures in the region revealed decadal-scale changes in the distribution and timing of shark captures in parallel with long-term ocean warming. Specifically, areas of highest catch densities have progressively increased poleward and catches have occurred earlier in the year off the North American shelf. During periods of anomalously high sea-surface temperatures, movements of tracked sharks shifted beyond spatial management zones that had been affording them protection from commercial fishing and bycatch. Taken together, these study results have implications for fisheries management, human-wildlife conflict, and ecosystem functioning