Buses, cars, bicycles and walkers the influence of the type of human transport on the flight responses of waterbirds

One way to manage disturbance to waterbirds in natural areas where humans require access is to promote the occurrence of stimuli for which birds tolerate closer approaches, and so cause fewer responses. We conducted 730 experimental approaches to 39 species of waterbird, using five stimulus types (single walker, three walkers, bicycle, car and bus) selected to mimic different human management options available for a controlled access, Ramsar-listed wetland. Across species, where differences existed (56% of 25 cases), motor vehicles always evoked shorter flight-initiation distances (FID) than humans on foot. The influence of stimulus type on FID varied across four species for which enough data were available for complete cross-stimulus analysis. All four varied FID in relation to stimuli, differing in 4 to 7 of 10 possible comparisons. Where differences occurred, the effect size was generally modest, suggesting that managing stimulus type (e.g. by requiring people to use vehicles) may have species-specific, modest benefits, at least for the waterbirds we studied. However, different stimulus types have different capacities to reduce the frequency of disturbance (i.e. by carrying more people) and vary in their capacity to travel around important habita

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

Understanding and study perspectives on tectonic evolution and crustal structure of the Paleozoic Chinese Tianshan

International audienceThe Chinese Tianshan Belt is one of the key regions for the understanding of tectonics of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB). An international field excursion and workshop were organized to conduct a common observation and discussion on the tectonic evolution of the Chinese Tianshan. This report summarizes the main achievements, including acknowledged geological features, controversial and remaining scientific problems, and discussion of a tentative geodynamic model. Thus, it is helpful to clarify what has been done in the past, what should be improved and what needs to be done in the future and therefore to better understand the tectonics of the Chinese Tianshan Belt and the CAOB as well

Understanding and study perspectives on tectonic evolution and crustal structure of the Paleozoic Chinese Tianshan

The Chinese Tianshan Belt is one of the key regions for the understanding of tectonics of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt (CAOB). An international field excursion and workshop were organized to conduct a common observation and discussion on the tectonic evolution of the Chinese Tianshan. This report summarizes the main achievements, including acknowledged geological features, controversial and remaining scientific problems, and discussion of a tentative geodynamic model. Thus, it is helpful to clarify what has been done in the past, what should be improved and what needs to be done in the future and therefore to better understand the tectonics of the Chinese Tianshan Belt and the CAOB as well