Biodiversity and phytogeography of Bolivia\u27s wetland flora

The composition, diversity, and phytogeographic affinities of the vascular flora of Bolivia\u27s wetlands were examined and compared with wetland floras from the other Neotropical countries and the New World Temperate region. Forty-six wetlands distributed throughout Bolivia and ranging in elevation from 90 in to \u3e4400 m were established as study sites. Regional and national wetland floras were compiled from field research, the literature, herbarium specimens, and available databases. Two thousand and sixty species in 149 families and 666 genera were identified as associated with wetlands in Mesoamerica and tropical and subtropical South America. Of these, 1026 species in 126 families and 450 genera were noted for Bolivian wetlands. When considered both in terms of number of species per system and in comparisons of species-area curves, Bolivia\u27s wetlands were found to be less diverse than wetlands of the New World Temperate region. At the macroregional level, both South and Central America were less diverse than the New World Temperate region. Thus, at both the system and regional scales, it appeared that phytodiversity in New World wetlands constituted an exception to the widely recognized latitudinal gradient in species richness. Additionally, phytodiversity in Neotropical wetlands was generally not well-correlated with diversity in terrestrial habitats. A large portion of the Neotropical wetland species possessed very broad ranges, and few endemic species were noted relative to the Neotropical terrestrial habitats. Similarity Indices were generally unsatisfactory for analyzing floristic similarities at the system level. Both Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) and Frequency Analysis produced more satisfactory results. Species that typically tended towards dominance in Bolivian wetlands most often were extremely widely distributed, precluding the identification of regional wetland associations based on dominant species. Nevertheless, ordination of the study sites by DCA generally grouped wetlands from within the same Bolivian region. At the macroregional level, an ordination by DCA ordered the countries of the Neotropics into three groups: (1) Bolivia, Brazil and Peru; (2) Colombia, The Guianas, and Venezuela; and, (3) all Central American countries. Two countries, Mexico and Ecuador, were not clearly associated with any group

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

Geoeconomic variations in epidemiology, ventilation management, and outcomes in invasively ventilated intensive care unit patients without acute respiratory distress syndrome: a pooled analysis of four observational studies

Background: Geoeconomic variations in epidemiology, the practice of ventilation, and outcome in invasively ventilated intensive care unit (ICU) patients without acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) remain unexplored. In this analysis we aim to address these gaps using individual patient data of four large observational studies. Methods: In this pooled analysis we harmonised individual patient data from the ERICC, LUNG SAFE, PRoVENT, and PRoVENT-iMiC prospective observational studies, which were conducted from June, 2011, to December, 2018, in 534 ICUs in 54 countries. We used the 2016 World Bank classification to define two geoeconomic regions: middle-income countries (MICs) and high-income countries (HICs). ARDS was defined according to the Berlin criteria. Descriptive statistics were used to compare patients in MICs versus HICs. The primary outcome was the use of low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV) for the first 3 days of mechanical ventilation. Secondary outcomes were key ventilation parameters (tidal volume size, positive end-expiratory pressure, fraction of inspired oxygen, peak pressure, plateau pressure, driving pressure, and respiratory rate), patient characteristics, the risk for and actual development of acute respiratory distress syndrome after the first day of ventilation, duration of ventilation, ICU length of stay, and ICU mortality. Findings: Of the 7608 patients included in the original studies, this analysis included 3852 patients without ARDS, of whom 2345 were from MICs and 1507 were from HICs. Patients in MICs were younger, shorter and with a slightly lower body-mass index, more often had diabetes and active cancer, but less often chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure than patients from HICs. Sequential organ failure assessment scores were similar in MICs and HICs. Use of LTVV in MICs and HICs was comparable (42·4% vs 44·2%; absolute difference -1·69 [-9·58 to 6·11] p=0·67; data available in 3174 [82%] of 3852 patients). The median applied positive end expiratory pressure was lower in MICs than in HICs (5 [IQR 5-8] vs 6 [5-8] cm H2O; p=0·0011). ICU mortality was higher in MICs than in HICs (30·5% vs 19·9%; p=0·0004; adjusted effect 16·41% [95% CI 9·52-23·52]; p<0·0001) and was inversely associated with gross domestic product (adjusted odds ratio for a US$10 000 increase per capita 0·80 [95% CI 0·75-0·86]; p<0·0001). Interpretation: Despite similar disease severity and ventilation management, ICU mortality in patients without ARDS is higher in MICs than in HICs, with a strong association with country-level economic status