Experiences from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest:\ud ecological findings and conservation initiatives

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest hosts one of the world’s most diverse and threatened tropical forest\ud biota. In many ways, its history of degradation describes the fate experienced by tropical forests\ud around the world. After five centuries of human expansion, most Atlantic Forest landscapes are\ud archipelagos of small forest fragments surrounded by open-habitat matrices. This ‘natural\ud laboratory’ has contributed to a better understanding of the evolutionary history and ecology of\ud tropical forests and to determining the extent to which this irreplaceable biota is susceptible to\ud major human disturbances.We share some of the major findings with respect to the responses of\ud tropical forests to human disturbances across multiple biological levels and spatial scales and\ud discuss some of the conservation initiatives adopted in the past decade. First, we provide a short\ud description of the Atlantic Forest biota and its historical degradation. Secondly, we offer\ud conceptual models describing major shifts experienced by tree assemblages at local scales and\ud discuss landscape ecological processes that can help to maintain this biota at larger scales. We\ud also examine potential plant responses to climate change. Finally, we propose a research agenda\ud to improve the conservation value of human-modified landscapes and safeguard the biological\ud heritage of tropical forests.C.A.J. was supported by grants from the BIOTA/FAPESP Program (FAPESP 03/12595-7, 10/50811-7, 12/51872-5) and CNPq (403710/2012-0). J.P.M. (307934/2011-0) and M.T. (304598/2011-9) thank the Brazilian Science Council (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientıfico) for their research fellowships. We thank Leandro Reverberi Tambosi for providing Fig. 1, and the three ad hoc reviewers for their constructive critical evaluation of the manuscript which resulted in a much improved final version

How are native vegetation and reserves affected by different road types in a Southeastern Brazilian State?

Reducing connectivity, road networks may threaten the effectiveness of natural reserves, thus, representing acritical conservation matter. This work aims to: 1) evaluate the relationship between native vegetation cover and roaddistance; 2) evaluate the extent to which native vegetation and nature reserves are affected by roads. Our study area wasa neotropical landscape in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. We divided the study area into 15 subregions to represent itshigh heterogeneity. First, we demarcated buffer zones of 10 different distances around each road, and quantified thedensity of roads and native vegetation cover. Second, we estimated the area ecologically affected by roads, the roadeffect zone, using buffers of increasing distances according to each road type. The most dense road network was foundin the São Paulo Metropolitan area and the lowest was the Southern Coastline subregion, but this subregion showed thesecond highest expressway density. These two subregions had stronger positive relationships between native vegetationcover and road distance. Almost 10% of São Paulo state, about 6% of the remaining native vegetation, and more than10% of the reserves were ecologically affected by roads. More than 50% of reserves were ecologically affected, andsome have more than 60% of their territory affected. Threats related to proximity of roads, i.e. logging, may reduceeffectiveness of more than 50% of natural reserves. Thus, we propose that identifying priority areas for integral conservationof pristine environments should include mostly remote areas, which are far from larger roads and under lower generalroad influence.FAPESP (Freitas’ post-doctorate fellowship, Proc. 2006/02673- 9

Review of the underpass alocation on the highway SP-225, Brotas-SP, Brazil, and the relationship with wild animals roadkills and landscape structure

The Road Ecology theme is new in Brazil and in Latin America in \ud general. Few studies and scientific publications were made in this area \ud with specific and replicable methodology. Underpasses were allocated on \ud the highway SP- 225, in the year of 2008, according to previous studies of \ud hotspots of roadkills made by IBAMA (Environmental Brazilian Institute), \ud but none of them considered the influence of the landscape structure on \ud the surrounding habitat. So, we aimed to analyze and understand which \ud component of the landscape structure can influence the roadkills in a \ud Brazilian highway and analyze if these underpasses was located in areas \ud of hotspots roadkills. Medium and large mammals carcasses were \ud collected by Centrovias (a private enterprise that managed the road) from \ud May 2005 to June 2006 in 56 km stretch on the highway SP- 225 in the \ud 110 \ud city of Brotas, São Paulo, Brazil. Were created occurrences reports for \ud each roadkilled animal containing: date, time, local on the highway (km + \ud m), geographic coordinate and the specie affected. Forest-patch metrics \ud (number of fragments, proportion of forest and size of the largest pacth) \ud were extracted from a 2008 CBERS 2B-CCD image using Fragstats \ud (version 3.3) to examine the best predictor to medium and large \ud mammals roadkills. Following a visual classification three land cover \ud classes were mapped (forest, non-forest and water) and 13 buffers zones \ud with 5 km were selected around the highway SP-225. An exploratory data \ud analysis was conducted through the Pearson‟s correlation and 6 models (1 \ud null model) were built to conduct a model selection procedure based on \ud the AICc value. There were 48 medium and large mammals roadkills on \ud the 56 stretch sampled between May 2005 and June 2006. The best model \ud selected to predict medium and large mammals roadkills on the SP- 225, \ud was the proportion of forest (wAICc = 0.97) on the 5 km surrounding \ud habitat. From 13 buffer zones analyzed, 4 presented the highest number \ud of roadkills (mean = 21.75, sd = 2.21) and the highest proportion of \ud forest (mean = 24.17, sd = 2.34), so the higher the proportion of forest, \ud higher will be the number of roadkills. In two of these buffer zones were \ud allocated an appropriate number of underpasses. In all the buffer zones \ud we had roadkills occurrence, but in three of them none underpass was \ud allocated. Despite the fact that there is a low number of roadkills in these \ud buffers (range: 2-4) the presence of at least one underpass will be \ud necessary to avoid these roadkills. The others buffers also had a low \ud number of roadkills (range: 4-6) but there are almost the same number of \ud underpasses allocated in the buffers zones with the higher number of \ud roadkills. The number of roadkills is strictly related to the proportion of \ud forest in the surrounding habitat, so we highlight the importance of the \ud landscape structure to predict the occurrence of medium size and large \ud bodied mammals roadkills and the use of this tool to allocate underpasses \ud in future road ecology studies

Next Generation Very Large Array Memo No. 9 Science Working Group 4: Time Domain, Fundamental Physics, and Cosmology

We report here on key science topics for the Next Generation Very Large Array in the areas of time domain, fundamental physics, and cosmology. Key science cases considered are pulsars in orbit around the Galactic Center massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves, and astrometric cosmology. These areas all have the potential for ground-breaking and transformative discovery. Numerous other topics were discussed during the preparation of this report and some of those discussions are summarized here, as well. There is no doubt that further investigation of the science case will reveal rich and compelling opportunities

Next Generation Very Large Array Memo No. 9 Science Working Group 4: Time Domain, Fundamental Physics, and Cosmology

We report here on key science topics for the Next Generation Very Large Array in the areas of time domain, fundamental physics, and cosmology. Key science cases considered are pulsars in orbit around the Galactic Center massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves, and astrometric cosmology. These areas all have the potential for ground-breaking and transformative discovery. Numerous other topics were discussed during the preparation of this report and some of those discussions are summarized here, as well. There is no doubt that further investigation of the science case will reveal rich and compelling opportunities

Diagnóstico brasileiro sobre biodiversidade e serviços ecossistêmicos : sumário para tomadores de decisão

A biodiversidade e os ecossistemas são elementos importantes para enfrentar as crises socioeconômicas e ambientais nacionais e globais, uma vez que proporcionam novas oportunidades de desenvolvimento. Incorporar a biodiversidade na vida cotidiana é uma oportunidade de ouro para promover o uso sustentável da biodiversidade e dos serviços ecossistêmicos. A conservação e a restauração da biodiversidade, dos ecossistemas e de seus serviços associados mostram potencial para um novo desenvolvimento social e econômico, como fonte de geração de emprego e renda, redução da pobreza e da desigualdade socioeconômica. A diversidade biológica brasileira também se expressa em sua imensa diversidade cultural, com uma grande variedade de detentores de conhecimento indígenas e tradicionais. Esses povos possuem vasto conhecimento sobre agrobiodiversidade, pesca, manejo do fogo, medicina natural, entre outros de valor comercial, cultural e espiritual. As principais conclusões deste Sumário para Tomadores de Decisão é que as mudanças no uso da terra e as mudanças climáticas tenham sido - e continuarão sendo ao longo deste século - os principais vetores da perda de biodiversidade e serviços ecossistêmicos no país. Intervenções políticas em diferentes níveis (do local ao nacional, do público ao privado) e a aplicação das leis existentes (mecanismos regulatórios e incentivos) são necessárias para promover a mitigação dos impactos negativos sobre a biodiversidade e a perda de serviços ecossistêmicos. O Brasil já possui uma ampla variedade de instrumentos de política e opções de governança socioambiental, bem como compromissos globais (ODS, Metas de Aichi, Acordo de Paris) relacionados à possibilidade de um futuro sustentável. Entretanto, o controle ineficiente da gestão ou a falta de incentivo para cumprir as regras traz riscos para a consolidação do caminho para esse futuro. O país tem instituições fortes e capazes, mas problemas de infraestrutura, processos lentos, medidas ineficazes e conflitos judiciais, sociais e ecológicos impedem a realização de um desempenho eficiente. Há uma falta de comunicação entre a ciência e a sociedade que precisa ser melhorada por meio do estabelecimento de um fluxo efetivo que torne a comunicação inclusiva e representativa, alcançando os tomadores de decisão públicos e privados. Esforços permanentes para integrar essas duas esferas de conhecimento na sociedade são desejáveis para criar confiança entre os formuladores de políticas e os pesquisadores.Biodiversity and ecosystems are important elements for addressing national and global socioeconomic and environmental crises, since they provide new development opportunities, for example, as source of job and income creation, and reduction in poverty and socioeconomic inequity. Brazilian biological diversity is also expressed in its immense cultural diversity, with a great variety of knowledge holders. These peoples possess vast knowledge on agrobiodiversity, fishing, fire management, natural medicine, among others of commercial, cultural and spiritual value. The main conclusions of this Summary for Police Makers is that land use changes and climate changes have been - and will continue to be throughout this century - the main drivers that result in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the country. Political interventions at different levels (from local to national, from public to private) and the enforcement of existing laws (regulatory mechanisms and incentives) are required to cope with the mitigation of the negative impacts of biodiversity and ecosystem services loss. Brazil has already a wide variety of policy instruments and socioenvironmental governance options, as well as global commitments (ODS, Aich Targets, Paris Agreement) related to the objective of a sustainable future. However, inefficient management control or lack of incentive to comply with the rules pose risks to consolidating the path to this future. The country has strong and capable institutions, but infrastructural problems, slow processes, inefficient measurements and judicial, social and ecological conflicts obstruct a proficient performance. There is a lack of communication between science and society which needs to be improved by establishing an effective flow that makes communication inclusive and representative, reaching public and private decision makers. Permanent efforts to integrate Science and policy knowledges are desirable to build confidence between policy makers and researchers

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

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

Measurement of the top quark forward-backward production asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric and chromomagnetic moments in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV

Abstract The parton-level top quark (t) forward-backward asymmetry and the anomalous chromoelectric (d̂ t) and chromomagnetic (μ̂ t) moments have been measured using LHC pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, collected in the CMS detector in a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb−1. The linearized variable AFB(1) is used to approximate the asymmetry. Candidate t t ¯ events decaying to a muon or electron and jets in final states with low and high Lorentz boosts are selected and reconstructed using a fit of the kinematic distributions of the decay products to those expected for t t ¯ final states. The values found for the parameters are AFB(1)=0.048−0.087+0.095(stat)−0.029+0.020(syst),μ̂t=−0.024−0.009+0.013(stat)−0.011+0.016(syst), and a limit is placed on the magnitude of | d̂ t| &lt; 0.03 at 95% confidence level. [Figure not available: see fulltext.

Measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of Y(1S) and Y(2S) mesons in PbPb collisions at root s(NN)=5.02 TeV

The second-order Fourier coefficients (v(2)) characterizing the azimuthal distributions of Y(1S) and Y(2S) mesons produced in PbPb collisions at root s(NN) = 5.02 TeV are studied. The Y mesons are reconstructed in their dimuon decay channel, as measured by the CMS detector. The collected data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 1.7 nb(-1). The scalar product method is used to extract the v2 coefficients of the azimuthal distributions. Results are reported for the rapidity range vertical bar y vertical bar < 2.4, in the transverse momentum interval 0 < pT < 50 GeV/c, and in three centrality ranges of 10-30%, 30-50% and 50-90%. In contrast to the J/psi mesons, the measured v(2) values for the Y mesons are found to be consistent with zero. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe