EcoVeg: a new approach to vegetation description and classification

A vegetation classification approach is needed that can describe the diversity of terrestrial ecosystems and their transformations over large time frames, span the full range of spatial and geographic scales across the globe, and provide knowledge of reference conditions and current states of ecosystems required to make decisions about conservation and resource management. We summarize the scientific basis for EcoVeg, a physiognomic-floristic-ecological classification approach that applies to existing vegetation, both cultural (planted and dominated by human processes) and natural (spontaneously formed and dominated by nonhuman ecological processes). The classification is based on a set of vegetation criteria, including physiognomy (growth forms, structure) and floristics (compositional similarity and characteristic species combinations), in conjunction with ecological characteristics, including site factors, disturbance, bioclimate, and biogeography. For natural vegetation, the rationale for the upper levels (formation types) is based on the relation between global-scale vegetation patterns and macroclimate, hydrology, and substrate. The rationale for the middle levels is based on scaling from regional formations (divisions) to regional floristic-physiognomic types (macrogroup and group) that respond to meso-scale biogeographic, climatic, disturbance, and site factors. Finally, the lower levels (alliance and association) are defined by detailed floristic composition that responds to local to regional topo-edaphic and disturbance gradients. For cultural vegetation, the rationale is similar, but types are based on distinctive vegetation physiognomy and floristics that reflect human activities. The hierarchy provides a structure that organizes regional/continental vegetation patterns in the context of global patterns. A formal nomenclature is provided, along with a descriptive template that provides the differentiating criteria for each type at all levels of the hierarchy. Formation types have been described for the globe; divisions and macrogroups for North America, Latin America and Africa; groups, alliances and associations for the United States, parts of Canada, Latin America and, in partnership with other classifications that share these levels, many other parts of the globe

Plant and animal endemism in the eastern Andean slope: challenges to conservation

Andean slope: challenges to conservatio

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

EJE-02-03 Bosques de la Región Amazónica Ecuatoriana: ¿Qué nos dicen las cifras de deforestación de los últimos 15 años?

RESUMENEl bosque de la cuenca del Río Amazonas, bosque tropical continuo más extenso del mundo, almacena grandes cantidades de carbono, alberga pueblos indígenas y colonos, y provee servicios ecosistémicos de importancia global. A pesar de varias iniciativas, la deforestación, una de las principales fuentes de emisiones antropogénicas de gases de efecto invernadero, continúa sin disminución. Los análisis indican que la Región Amazónica Ecuatoriana (RAE) ha perdido 1.1% de sus bosques en el último quinquenio 2010-2015, lo que implica una reducción de la deforestación con respecto al quinquenio anterior 2005-2010 de -12%, tendencia similar a la de la Cuenca Amazónica. El análisis demuestra que existió una reducción de la deforestación en Territorios Indígenas (TI, -16%) y en Áreas Naturales Protegidas (ANP, -3%), mientras que en áreas de ANP sin solapamiento con TI ha aumentado (+18%), contrario a la tendencia general. En áreas de solapamiento entre ANP y TI la deforestación ha disminuido (-35%) al igual que en las áreas fuera de ANP y/o TI (-15%).La preocupación frente a este tema ha convocado la participación de organizaciones científicas en el desarrollo de metodologías para generar información estandarizada sobre las dinámicas de la pérdida de bosque a nivel panamazónico. En este marco, EcoCiencia, como parte de la Red Amazónica de Información Socioambiental Georreferenciada (RAISG), ha producido análisis quinquenales de deforestación (2000-2015) para la RAE, mediante un protocolo metodológico compartido por los 9 países de la cuenca, basados en clasificación de imágenes satelitales y herramientas de procesamiento en la nube.Palabras clave: Cuenca Amazónica, deforestación, sensores remotos. ABSTRACTThe Amazon River Basin Forest, the world’s largest continuous tropical forest, stores large amounts of carbon, shelters indigenous peoples and settlers, and provides ecosystem services of global significance. Despite several initiatives, deforestation, which represents one of the main sources of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, continues unabated at the global level. Our analysis indicates that the Ecuadorian Amazonian Region (RAE) has lost 1.1% of its forests in the last five years 2010-2015, which implies a -12% reduction of deforestation in relation to the previous five-year period 2005-2010, a trend similar to that of the Amazon basin. The analysis of deforested areas between these five year periods shows that deforestation declined within Indigenous Territories (-16%) and within Natural Protected Areas (-3%). However, this latter value combines a decrease indeforestation in areas of overlap between ANP and IT (-35%) and an increase in ANP areas without overlap with IT (+ 18%). The areas outside ANP and / or IT had a decrease of -15%.Concern about this issue has called for the active participation of scientific organizations in the development of methodologies to understand and generate standardized informa-tion on the dynamics of forest loss at the Pan-Amazonian level. Within this framework, EcoCiencia Foundation, as part of the RAISG, has produced deforestation analyzes forthree five-year periods from 2000 to 2015 for the RAE through a methodological protocol shared by the 9 countries of the basin, based on automated classification of satellite im-agery and, more recently, cloud processing tools.Keywords: Amazon basin, deforestation, remote sensing

Long-term loss in extent and current protection of terrestrial ecosystem diversity in the temperate and tropical Americas.

Documenting changes in ecosystem extent and protection is essential to understanding status of biodiversity and related ecosystem services and have direct applications to measuring Essential Biodiversity Variables, Targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. We developed both potential and current distribution maps of terrestrial ecosystem types for the temperate and tropical Americas; with "potential" estimating where a type would likely occur today had there not been prior land conversion for modern land uses. We utilized a hierarchical classification to describe and map natural ecosystem types at six levels of thematic detail, with lower thematic levels defining more units each with narrower floristic range than upper levels. Current land use/land cover was derived using available global data on human land use intensity and combined with the potential distribution maps to estimate long-term change in extent for each ecosystem type. We also assessed representation of ecosystem types within protected areas as defined by IUCN I-VI land status categories. Of the 749 ecosystem types assessed, represented at 5th (n = 315) vs. 6th (n = 433) levels of the classification hierarchy, 5 types (1.6%) and 31 types (7.1%), respectively, have lost >90% of their potential extent. Some 66 types (20.9%) and 141 types (32.5%), respectively, have lost >50% of their potential extent; thus, crossing thresholds of Vulnerable status under IUCN Red List criterion A3. For ecosystem type representation within IUCN protected area classes, with reference to potential extent of each type, 111 (45.3%) and 125 (28.8%) of types, respectively, have higher representation (>17%) than CBD 2020 targets. Twelve types (3.8%) and 23 (5.3%) of types, respectively, are represented with <1% within protected areas. We illustrate an option for visualizing and reporting on CBD targets (2020 and proposed post-2020) for ecosystem representativeness using both potential extent as a baseline

New Cretaceous crickets of the subfamilies Nemobiinae and Podoscirtinae (Orthoptera, Grylloidea: Trigonidiidae, Oecanthidae) attest the antiquity of these clades

International audienceFossils are more and more used in phylogenetic evolutionary studies either for clade calibration, or as terminals in a dataset including morphological characters. The strength of these methodological advances relies however on the quality and completeness of the fossil record. For crickets (Insecta, Orthoptera, Gryllidea), few ancient (pre-Cenozoic) well-preserved fossils are known, except for isolated wings often classified in purely fossil groups and a few fossils found in Cretaceous amber. Here, we present two remarkable fossils from mid-Cretaceous amber of France, that were imaged using X-ray synchrotron microtomography and exhibit an exquisite preservation allowing description with a precision similar to that of extant taxa. Palaeonemobius occidentalis Laurent and Desutter-Grandcolas, gen. nov., sp. nov. and Picogryllus carentonensis Josse and Desutter-Grandcolas, gen. nov., sp. nov. are the oldest representatives of the Nemobiinae and Podoscirtinae subfamilies of the Trigonidiidae and Oecanthidae families respectively. P. carentonensis Josse and Desutter-Grandcolas, gen. nov., sp. nov. is also the smallest adult male with a full stridulatory apparatus ever documented in crickets (body length 3.3 mm), and the first taxon of the cricket clade for which male genitalia can be partly described. We discuss the significance of Cretaceous fossils of crickets for future evolutionary studies of this clade