Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5,6,7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8,9,10,11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases.13,14,15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol and Cannabidiol produce dissociable effects on prefrontal cortical executive function and regulation of affective behaviors

The use of cannabis for therapeutic and recreational purposes is growing exponentially. Nevertheless, substantial questions remain concerning the potential cognitive and affective side-effects associated with cannabis exposure. In particular, the effects of specific marijuana-derived phytocannabinoids on neural regions such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are of concern, given the role of the PFC in both executive cognitive function and affective processing. The main biologically active phytocannabinoids, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), interact with multiple neurotransmitter systems important for these processes directly within the PFC. Considerable evidence has demonstrated that acute or chronic THC exposure may induce psychotomimetic effects, whereas CBD has been shown to produce potentially therapeutic effects for both psychosis and/or anxiety-related symptoms. Using an integrative combination of cognitive and affective behavioral pharmacological assays in rats, we report that acute intra-PFC infusions of THC produce anxiogenic effects while producing no impairments in executive function. In contrast, acute infusions of intra-PFC CBD impaired attentional set-shifting and spatial working memory, without interfering with anxiety or sociability behaviors. In contrast, intra-PFC CBD reversed the cognitive impairments induced by acute glutamatergic antagonism within the PFC, and blocked the anxiogenic properties of THC, suggesting that the therapeutic properties of CBD within the PFC may be present only during pathologically aberrant states within the PFC. Interestingly, the effects of PFC THC vs. CBD were found to be mediated through dissociable CB1 vs. 5-HT1A-dependent receptor signaling mechanisms, directly in the PFC