Distribution and abundance of benthic macroinvertebrates and zooplankton in lakes in Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site of Canada, Nova Scotia

As part of the Acid Rain Biomonitoring Program at Environment Canada, we sampled aquatic biodiversity in 20 acidic lakes in 2009 and 2010 in Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site of Canada and vicinity in Nova Scotia. We established an inventory of current aquatic macroinvertebrate and zooplankton species composition and abundance in each of the 20 study lakes. A total of 197 macroinvertebrate taxa were identified; the number of taxa observed was positively correlated with pH across the 20 lakes. Acid-tolerant taxa, such as isopods, amphipods, trichopterans, and oligochaetes, were common and abundant, while bivalves, gastropods, and leeches were lower in abundance. The number of isopods and amphipods collected was correlated with calcium concentration; a greater proportion of isopods than amphipods were collected from lakes with low calcium and low pH. Taxa with hard, calcareous shells, such as bivalves and gastropods, were not present in lakes with low calcium and low pH, with bivalves occurring only in lakes above pH 4.9. Odonates and ephemeropterans, which were low in abundance, were associated with a wide range of acidity. Coleopteran abundance was positively correlated with concentrations of dissolved organic carbon. A total of 26 zooplankton taxa were collected, but only cyclopoid abundance was correlated with lake pH. Results presented here provide a summary of aquatic biodiversity in lakes in Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site and vicinity and provide a baseline for future monitoring as acid deposition continues to affect this acid-sensitive region in Atlantic Canada

In the twilight zone: patterns in Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor) acoustic signals during the breeding season and recommendations for surveys

Surveys optimized to coincide with peak detectability of target species are critical to the success of monitoring programs, especially those targeting species of conservation concern. Established species-specific survey protocols are often inconsistent between jurisdictions, with limited spatial and temporal data to inform survey timing. The recent proliferation of programmable autonomous recording units (ARUs) and automated detection software enables the processing of huge volumes of acoustic data, which can improve our understanding of the acoustic phenology of many bird species. In May–July 2014, we deployed ARUs across a gradient of latitude near the northern limit of the breeding range of the Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor), a species of conservation concern, to quantify variation in temporal detection patterns. Most activity occurred after sunset and before sunrise, with a pronounced peak during civil twilight. We found considerable latitudinal differences in the activity patterns of birds, related to variation in the occurrence or duration of twilight periods. At northern sites (> 60° N), birds were active from dusk until dawn, likely because civil twilight lasted the entire period. At southern sites ( 50° N) and between mid-June and mid-July further north, given high activity rates throughout the breeding season. Given that non-vocal booms are more strongly associated with breeding activity and nesting sites, future surveys should focus on targeting this acoustic signal. Considering the timing of activity patterns in this species, we recommend a targeted, species-specific survey to ensure documentation of their abundance and distribution. Finally, we provide recommendations to improve survey timing and provide advice for acoustic data management and processing in relation to this species

A Graph-Based Recovery and Decomposition of Swanson’s Hypothesis using Semantic Predications

Objectives This paper presents a methodology for recovering and decomposing Swanson’s Raynaud Syndrome–Fish Oil hypothesis semi-automatically. The methodology leverages the semantics of assertions extracted from biomedical literature (called semantic predications) along with structured background knowledge and graph-based algorithms to semi-automatically capture the informative associations originally discovered manually by Swanson. Demonstrating that Swanson’s manually intensive techniques can be undertaken semi-automatically, paves the way for fully automatic semantics-based hypothesis generation from scientific literature. Methods Semantic predications obtained from biomedical literature allow the construction of labeled directed graphs which contain various associations among concepts from the literature. By aggregating such associations into informative subgraphs, some of the relevant details originally articulated by Swanson have been uncovered. However, by leveraging background knowledge to bridge important knowledge gaps in the literature, a methodology for semi-automatically capturing the detailed associations originally explicated in natural language by Swanson, has been developed. Results Our methodology not only recovered the three associations commonly recognized as Swanson’s hypothesis, but also decomposed them into an additional 16 detailed associations, formulated as chains of semantic predications. Altogether, 14 out of the 19 associations that can be attributed to Swanson were retrieved using our approach. To the best of our knowledge, such an in-depth recovery and decomposition of Swanson’s hypothesis has never been attempted. Conclusion In this work therefore, we presented a methodology to semi-automatically recover and decompose Swanson’s RS-DFO hypothesis using semantic representations and graph algorithms. Our methodology provides new insights into potential prerequisites for semantics-driven Literature-Based Discovery (LBD). Based on our observations, three critical aspects of LBD include: (1) the need for more expressive representations beyond Swanson’s ABC model; (2) an ability to accurately extract semantic information from text; and (3) the semantic integration of scientific literature and structured background knowledge