Investigating the relationship between abiotic factors, canopy openness and understory plant diversity in three forest types of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

The Neotropical region stands as one of the most diverse places on earth, housing nearly 50% of the world's biodiversity. Various biotic and abiotic factors within the Costa Rican environment have rendered growth conditions conducive to over ten thousand plant species. Because of the high plant diversity in this region, a need for inventorying of understory composition exists. We investigated the relationship between canopy openness, soil moisture, leaf litter and organic layer depth and understory plant diversity within the Osa Conservation area of Costa Rica. We hypothesized there would be a difference in understory composition across three different forest types: old growth, secondary, and gallery forests. Data were collected during the region’s dry El Niño season from February 12 - 24, 2016. Within each forest type, three 25m2 sampling plots were marked along a 100m transect. Understory plants were recorded and identified down to the family level. We constructed rank cover graphs and calculated diversity indices to assess family richness and evenness. We conducted one-way ANOVAs to test for any significant differences in plant abundances and abiotic factors across the forest types. The diversity indices indicated highest diversity in old growth forest. Soil moisture was significantly higher in gallery forest compared to old growth. Certain plant families were more common in secondary forest, suggesting they are early successional plants. We will discuss further in our prepared poster. We hope that our report will positively contribute to the knowledge of the Osa Peninsula understory.  *Indicates faculty mentor

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

Indigenous pedagogy on childhood: A consultation with the two Anishinabeg communities of Long Point First Nation and Rapid Lake, Quebec

Many Indigenous communities view children as sacred gifts deserving of love and respect, and as the ones who will carry their collective ways of life forward. However, Indigenous young people within Canada face disproportionate challenges to their health and well-being, partly a result of ongoing colonial practices within professional services. In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action regarding improvements to professional education and training, our team conducted an international scoping review which identified that Indigenous pedagogy is rarely included in curricular development. We completed this scoping review’s consultation phase in two Anishinabeg communities. In this consultation, we posed the following questions: What are Anishinaabe perspectives on and experiences of child-focused professional practices? How are child-focused professionals currently prepared to work with young Anishinabeg peoples? How should they be prepared? Participants highlighted the importance of professionals learning Indigenous history and Anishinaabe culture, having field-based education, and engaging children with hands-on activities. Professionals encountered little to no Indigenous-focused content in their formal education, with most exposure occurring in continuing education settings. Our results suggest Indigenous ways of knowing can and should be honored in child-focused professional education, thereby supporting the development of effective and culturally-safe relationships between professionals and Indigenous peoples

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press