34 research outputs found

    SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE FISHERY OF LAOANG, NORTHERN SAMAR, PHILIPPINES

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    Between September 2015 and August 2017 the author lived and worked in Laoang, a municipality in the province of Northern Samar in the Philippines. The author worked as a Coastal Resource Management Volunteer with the Municipal Environment and Natural Resources Office. This report discusses current and potential management strategies concerning the fishery of Laoang, particularly concerning the Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) placed at the edge of the municipal waters. Information was compiled during the development of two 10-hectare Marine Protected Areas and a Fish Catch Monitoring program. Various strategies for both the FAD and coastal areas of the fishery are discussed, including enhanced environmental education and protection, limiting adding FADs to the municipal waters, and promoting tourism. While many of the programs discussed already exist in Laoang, these programs can potentially be expanded on to enhance the sustainability of the fishery to promote food security and income

    Adaptive Radiation within Marine Anisakid Nematodes: A Zoogeographical Modeling of Cosmopolitan, Zoonotic Parasites

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    Parasites of the nematode genus Anisakis are associated with aquatic organisms. They can be found in a variety of marine hosts including whales, crustaceans, fish and cephalopods and are known to be the cause of the zoonotic disease anisakiasis, a painful inflammation of the gastro-intestinal tract caused by the accidental consumptions of infectious larvae raw or semi-raw fishery products. Since the demand on fish as dietary protein source and the export rates of seafood products in general is rapidly increasing worldwide, the knowledge about the distribution of potential foodborne human pathogens in seafood is of major significance for human health. Studies have provided evidence that a few Anisakis species can cause clinical symptoms in humans. The aim of our study was to interpolate the species range for every described Anisakis species on the basis of the existing occurrence data. We used sequence data of 373 Anisakis larvae from 30 different hosts worldwide and previously published molecular data (n = 584) from 53 field-specific publications to model the species range of Anisakis spp., using a interpolation method that combines aspects of the alpha hull interpolation algorithm as well as the conditional interpolation approach. The results of our approach strongly indicate the existence of species-specific distribution patterns of Anisakis spp. within different climate zones and oceans that are in principle congruent with those of their respective final hosts. Our results support preceding studies that propose anisakid nematodes as useful biological indicators for their final host distribution and abundance as they closely follow the trophic relationships among their successive hosts. The modeling might although be helpful for predicting the likelihood of infection in order to reduce the risk of anisakiasis cases in a given area

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

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    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

    Management of local fisheries: A case study of Laoang, Northern Samar, Philippines

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    This paper investigates the ongoing management of fish resources at the municipality-level in the Philippines. The paper presents a case study of the current and potential management strategies for the fishery of Laoang, Philippines. Ongoing management activities include the placement of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) in the municipal waters, development of two 10-hectare Marine Protected Areas, and a Fish Catch Monitoring program. Local management efforts for using the FADs and the improvement of the coastal areas of the fishery are discussed, including enhanced environmental education and protection and limits on adding FADs to the municipal waters. The FADs have shown to increase average catch about 5 kg. In order to achieve the goals of managing the local fishery to promote food security and income, three management steps must be achieved: the appropriate organizational structure needs to be in place, management programs need to be seen as meeting community needs, and the momentum must be continued by increasing existing programs and adding new ones

    In situ secondary organic aerosol formation from ambient pine forest air using an oxidation flow reactor

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    An oxidation flow reactor (OFR) is a vessel inside which the concentration of a chosen oxidant can be increased for the purpose of studying SOA formation and aging by that oxidant. During the BEACHON-RoMBAS (Bio-hydro-atmosphere interactions of Energy, Aerosols, Carbon, H<sub>2</sub>O, Organics &amp; Nitrogen–Rocky Mountain Biogenic Aerosol Study) field campaign, ambient pine forest air was oxidized by OH radicals in an OFR to measure the amount of SOA that could be formed from the real mix of ambient SOA precursor gases, and how that amount changed with time as precursors changed. High OH concentrations and short residence times allowed for semicontinuous cycling through a large range of OH exposures ranging from hours to weeks of equivalent (eq.) atmospheric aging. A simple model is derived and used to account for the relative timescales of condensation of low-volatility organic compounds (LVOCs) onto particles; condensational loss to the walls; and further reaction to produce volatile, non-condensing fragmentation products. More SOA production was observed in the OFR at nighttime (average 3 µg m<sup>−3</sup> when LVOC fate corrected) compared to daytime (average 0.9 µg m<sup>−3</sup> when LVOC fate corrected), with maximum formation observed at 0.4–1.5 eq. days of photochemical aging. SOA formation followed a similar diurnal pattern to monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, and toluene+<i>p</i>-cymene concentrations, including a substantial increase just after sunrise at 07:00 local time. Higher photochemical aging (&gt; 10 eq. days) led to a decrease in new SOA formation and a loss of preexisting OA due to heterogeneous oxidation followed by fragmentation and volatilization. When comparing two different commonly used methods of OH production in OFRs (OFR185 and OFR254-70), similar amounts of SOA formation were observed. We recommend the OFR185 mode for future forest studies. Concurrent gas-phase measurements of air after OH oxidation illustrate the decay of primary VOCs, production of small oxidized organic compounds, and net production at lower ages followed by net consumption of terpenoid oxidation products as photochemical age increased. New particle formation was observed in the reactor after oxidation, especially during times when precursor gas concentrations and SOA formation were largest. Approximately 4.4 times more SOA was formed in the reactor from OH oxidation than could be explained by the VOCs measured in ambient air. To our knowledge this is the first time that this has been shown when comparing VOC concentrations with SOA formation measured at the same time, rather than comparing measurements made at different times. Several recently developed instruments have quantified ambient semivolatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds (S/IVOCs) that were not detected by a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS). An SOA yield of 18–58 % from those compounds can explain the observed SOA formation. S/IVOCs were the only pool of gas-phase carbon that was large enough to explain the observed SOA formation. This work suggests that these typically unmeasured gases play a substantial role in ambient SOA formation. Our results allow ruling out condensation sticking coefficients much lower than 1. These measurements help clarify the magnitude of potential SOA formation from OH oxidation in forested environments and demonstrate methods for interpretation of ambient OFR measurements

    Purely electronic zero-phonon line as the foundation stone for high-resolution matrix spectroscopy, single-impurity-molecule spectroscopy, and persistent spectral hole burning. Recent developments

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    A few examples of recent progress in the study and applications of purely electronic zerophonon line (ZPL) and its offshoots are briefly considered: new experimental values of the narrowest ZPL; time-and-space-domain holography in the femtosecond domain, and the realization of a femtosecond Taffoli gate by it; single-impurity-molecule spectroscopy, its relation to single-photon interference and to the realization of quantum computing; the promises of quantum computing compared to what has already been done in holography
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