4 research outputs found
Simulating rewetting events in intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams: A global analysis of leached nutrients and organic matter
Climate change and human pressures are changing the global distribution and the ex‐
tent of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES), which comprise half of the
global river network area. IRES are characterized by periods of flow cessation, during
which channel substrates accumulate and undergo physico‐chemical changes (precon‐
ditioning), and periods of flow resumption, when these substrates are rewetted and
release pulses of dissolved nutrients and organic matter (OM). However, there are no
estimates of the amounts and quality of leached substances, nor is there information
on the underlying environmental constraints operating at the global scale. We experi‐
mentally simulated, under standard laboratory conditions, rewetting of leaves, river‐
bed sediments, and epilithic biofilms collected during the dry phase across 205 IRES
from five major climate zones. We determined the amounts and qualitative character‐
istics of the leached nutrients and OM, and estimated their areal fluxes from riverbeds.
In addition, we evaluated the variance in leachate characteristics in relation to selected
environmental variables and substrate characteristics. We found that sediments, due
to their large quantities within riverbeds, contribute most to the overall flux of dis‐
solved substances during rewetting events (56%–98%), and that flux rates distinctly
differ among climate zones. Dissolved organic carbon, phenolics, and nitrate contrib‐
uted most to the areal fluxes. The largest amounts of leached substances were found
in the continental climate zone, coinciding with the lowest potential bioavailability of
the leached OM. The opposite pattern was found in the arid zone. Environmental vari‐
ables expected to be modified under climate change (i.e. potential evapotranspiration,
aridity, dry period duration, land use) were correlated with the amount of leached sub‐
stances, with the strongest relationship found for sediments. These results show that
the role of IRES should be accounted for in global biogeochemical cycles, especially
because prevalence of IRES will increase due to increasing severity of drying event
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 Development of Executive Functioning and Theory of Mind. A Comparison of Chinese and U.S. Preschoolers
Simulating rewetting events in intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams: A global analysis of leached nutrients and organic matter
Climate change and human pressures are changing the global distribution and the ex‐
tent of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES), which comprise half of the
global river network area. IRES are characterized by periods of flow cessation, during
which channel substrates accumulate and undergo physico‐chemical changes (precon‐
ditioning), and periods of flow resumption, when these substrates are rewetted and
release pulses of dissolved nutrients and organic matter (OM). However, there are no
estimates of the amounts and quality of leached substances, nor is there information
on the underlying environmental constraints operating at the global scale. We experi‐
mentally simulated, under standard laboratory conditions, rewetting of leaves, river‐
bed sediments, and epilithic biofilms collected during the dry phase across 205 IRES
from five major climate zones. We determined the amounts and qualitative character‐
istics of the leached nutrients and OM, and estimated their areal fluxes from riverbeds.
In addition, we evaluated the variance in leachate characteristics in relation to selected
environmental variables and substrate characteristics. We found that sediments, due
to their large quantities within riverbeds, contribute most to the overall flux of dis‐
solved substances during rewetting events (56%–98%), and that flux rates distinctly
differ among climate zones. Dissolved organic carbon, phenolics, and nitrate contrib‐
uted most to the areal fluxes. The largest amounts of leached substances were found
in the continental climate zone, coinciding with the lowest potential bioavailability of
the leached OM. The opposite pattern was found in the arid zone. Environmental vari‐
ables expected to be modified under climate change (i.e. potential evapotranspiration,
aridity, dry period duration, land use) were correlated with the amount of leached sub‐
stances, with the strongest relationship found for sediments. These results show that
the role of IRES should be accounted for in global biogeochemical cycles, especially
because prevalence of IRES will increase due to increasing severity of drying event