Improving the framework for assessment of ecological change in the Arctic: A circumpolar synthesis of freshwater biodiversity

1. Climate warming and subsequent landscape transformations result in rapid ecological change in Arctic freshwaters. Here we provide a synthesis of the diversity of benthic diatoms, plankton, macrophytes, macroinvertebrates, and fish in Arctic freshwaters.2. We developed a multi-organism measure of alpha diversity to characterise circumpolar spatial patterns and their environmental correlates, and we assessed ecoregion-level beta diversity for all organism groups across the Arctic.3. Alpha diversity was lowest at high latitudes and elevations and where dispersal barriers exist. Diversity was positively related to temperature, and both temperature and connectivity limited diversity on high latitude islands. Beta diversity was highly variable among ecoregions for most organism groups, ranging from 0 (complete similarity) to 1 (complete dissimilarity). The high degree of dissimilarity within many ecoregions illustrates the uniqueness of many Arctic freshwater communities.4. Northward range expansion of freshwater taxa into Arctic regions may lead to increased competition for cold-stenothermic and cold-adapted species, and ultimately lead to the extinction of unique Arctic species. Societal responses to predicted impacts include: (1) actions to improve detection of changes (e.g., harmonised monitoring, remote sensing) and engagement with Arctic residents and Indigenous Peoples; and (2) actions to reduce the impact of unwanted changes (e.g., reductions of CO2 emissions, action against the spread of invasive species).5. Current Arctic freshwater monitoring shows large gaps in spatial coverage, while time series data are scarce. Arctic countries should develop an intensified, long-term monitoring programme with routine reporting. Such an approach will allow detection of long-term changes in water quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem services of Arctic freshwaters

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

Determinismo en Conversación en la catedral

Denne masteroppgaven påviser og analyserer de deterministiske trekkene i romanen Conversación en La Catedral av Mario Vargas Llosa. Tilnærmingen til dette går gjennom en analyse av tre sentrale karakterer i verket: Santiago, Ambrosio og Amalia. Det vil gjennom eksempler fra verket samt gjennom teori fra blant andre Mitchell, som reaktualiserer determinismen som et interessant fenomen innen litterær analyse og Fanon/De Beauvoir/Freire, som gjennom sine analyser viser oss hvordan hverdagen til de tre nevnte karakterene determineres av forhold fullstendig utenfor deres kontroll, tre fram et bilde av et litterært univers preget av tydelige deterministiske trekk. Videre fremgår det av denne oppgaven at de deterministiske trekkene i romanen bidrar til at presentasjonen av frykten, apatien og håpløsheten til karakterene under militærdiktaturet til Odría i Peru mellom 1948 og 1956 framstår som troverdig og logisk for leseren. Helt kort kan det også sies at romanen byr på kompliserte fortellertekniker og litterære grep. De narrative virkemidlene som brukes i romanen er grundig analysert tidligere, men i oppgaven analyseres i et eget kapittel de teknikkene som bidrar til å fremme de deterministiske trekkene ved romanen. I den sammenheng kommer det også fram hvordan det finnes en sammenheng mellom historien og diskursen i romanen