Restoring a New Wild Population of Blue Iguanas (Cyclura lewisi) in the Salina Reserve, Grand Cayman

Twenty-three immature Grand Cayman Blue Iguanas (Cyclura lewisi) were released into xerophytic shrubland in the Salina Reserve on Grand Cayman in December 2004. After seven months in the wild, at least 91% had survived, remained in the release areas, and grown. The iguanas are expected to reach sexual maturity by 2006. The females were occupying average usage areas of approximately 0.6 acres in summer 2005, very similar to the summer usage areas occupied by much older, mature females in the QE II Botanic Park. The maximum viable population density for this age class in this habitat is estimated to be between 4 and 5 iguanas/acre. The existing release area is just sufficient to accept the next release of 60–70 two-year-old Blue Iguanas, scheduled for December 2005. One concern is that these iguanas may instinctively leave the reserve to seek historic nesting habitat on the adjacent coast, where vehicular traffic is now a severe threat

Restoring a New Wild Population of Blue Iguanas (Cyclura lewisi) in the Salina Reserve, Grand Cayman

Twenty-three immature Grand Cayman Blue Iguanas (Cyclura lewisi) were released into xerophytic shrubland in the Salina Reserve on Grand Cayman in December 2004. After seven months in the wild, at least 91% had survived, remained in the release areas, and grown. The iguanas are expected to reach sexual maturity by 2006. The females were occupying average usage areas of approximately 0.6 acres in summer 2005, very similar to the summer usage areas occupied by much older, mature females in the QE II Botanic Park. The maximum viable population density for this age class in this habitat is estimated to be between 4 and 5 iguanas/acre. The existing release area is just sufficient to accept the next release of 60–70 two-year-old Blue Iguanas, scheduled for December 2005. One concern is that these iguanas may instinctively leave the reserve to seek historic nesting habitat on the adjacent coast, where vehicular traffic is now a severe threat

Battling Extinction: A View Forward for the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana (Cyclura lewisi)

The National Trust for the Cayman Islands has been implementing conservation efforts for Cyclura lewisi since 1990. Commencing with small-scale captive breeding, the program has expanded to include field research, large-scale captive breeding and head-starting, reintroduction and restocking, habitat protection and management, education, and awareness activities. A formal species recovery plan is in place. In the past 12 years, the size of the wild population appears to have declined from 100–200 to 10–25 animals and is functionally extinct. Principal causes for the decline are habitat loss, predation by introduced mammals, road kills, and continued exploitation by humans. Reproduction in the wild by animals released from the captive breeding population has been confirmed. However, in order to assure the greatest possible genetic diversity within the captive population, wild individuals with potentially distinct genetic constitutions must be captured and assessed before their genes become diluted as a consequence of interbreeding with released animals. Goals of 100 hatchlings and approximately 100 two-year-old iguanas for release annually are being approached. Options for restoring self-sustaining wild populations are limited to habitat islands, for which perimeter fencing will be essential to restrain iguanas and exclude predators. The recovery program is operating on institutional grants, program-generated income, and private donations, but we hope that this charismatic lizard will become able to support its own survival through carefully managed tourism activities and related commerce

Battling Extinction: A View Forward for the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana (Cyclura lewisi)

The National Trust for the Cayman Islands has been implementing conservation efforts for Cyclura lewisi since 1990. Commencing with small-scale captive breeding, the program has expanded to include field research, large-scale captive breeding and head-starting, reintroduction and restocking, habitat protection and management, education, and awareness activities. A formal species recovery plan is in place. In the past 12 years, the size of the wild population appears to have declined from 100–200 to 10–25 animals and is functionally extinct. Principal causes for the decline are habitat loss, predation by introduced mammals, road kills, and continued exploitation by humans. Reproduction in the wild by animals released from the captive breeding population has been confirmed. However, in order to assure the greatest possible genetic diversity within the captive population, wild individuals with potentially distinct genetic constitutions must be captured and assessed before their genes become diluted as a consequence of interbreeding with released animals. Goals of 100 hatchlings and approximately 100 two-year-old iguanas for release annually are being approached. Options for restoring self-sustaining wild populations are limited to habitat islands, for which perimeter fencing will be essential to restrain iguanas and exclude predators. The recovery program is operating on institutional grants, program-generated income, and private donations, but we hope that this charismatic lizard will become able to support its own survival through carefully managed tourism activities and related commerce

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