Composição da fauna de formigas (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) de serapilheira em florestas semidecídua e de Eucalyptus spp., na região sudeste do Brasil

Este estudo teve como objetivo avaliar a composição da fauna de formigas de serapilheira em áreas de floresta semidecídua com plantio de eucalipto sem manejo durante diferentes períodos. Foram estudadas quatro áreas, sendo três com eucalipto e uma formada por vegetação nativa; todas estão localizadas no município de Rio Claro (SP), sudeste do Brasil. em cada área foram coletadas 100 amostras de 1 m² de serapilheira, abrangendo os períodos seco e chuvoso da região. Cada amostra foi submetida a extratores do tipo mini-winkler, onde permaneceram por 48 horas. Foram amostradas 58.410 formigas, distribuídas em 10 subfamílias, 42 gêneros e 120 morfoespécies/espécies. Destas, 85 espécies foram encontradas na floresta semidecídua e 84 na floresta de Eucalyptus tereticornis com 100 anos sem manejo. Já nas florestas de E. tereticornis e E. urophylla com 22 anos sem manejo foram encontradas 73 e 56 espécies, respectivamente. Baseando-se em estudos anteriores, este inventário proporcionou o conhecimento de mais 16 gêneros e 24 espécies para a região estudada, sendo três exóticas. A ordenação das amostras com o escalonamento multidimensional não-métrico (NMDS) indicou diferença na similaridade entre as amostras das áreas, especialmente àquelas pertencentes à floresta de E. urophylla. Além do período sem manejo, a presença de substâncias alelopáticas na serapilheira pode estar interferindo no número de espécies e nas comunidades. Os resultados demonstram a importância das florestas abandonadas de eucaliptos para a manutenção da diversidade de formigas em uma região em que a vegetação nativa é escassa.This study aimed to evaluate the composition of the litter ant fauna in areas of semi-deciduous forest with eucalyptus plantations without management during different ages. Four sites were studied, three with eucalyptus and one with native vegetation, all located in the Municipality of Rio Claro (São Paulo State), Southeastern Brazil. At each site, 100 samples of 1 m² of leaf litter were collected, comprising the dry and wet seasons. Each sample was submitted to a mini-Winkler extractor for 48 hours. In total, 58,410 ants were sampled, distributed in 10 subfamilies, 42 genera and 120 morphospecies/species. Among them, 85 species were found in semi-deciduous forest, and 84 in the Eucalyptus tereticornis forest with 100 years without management. While in the forests of E. tereticornis and E. urophylla with 22 years without management, we recorded 73 and 56 species, respectively. Based on previous studies, this survey provided the record of over 16 genera and 24 species previously unknown for the studied region, with three exotic species. The samples ordination using the non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) indicated difference in the similarity between the samples, especially those from the E. urophylla forest. Beyond the period without management, the presence of allelopathic substances in the litter may be interfering in the number of species and in the communities. The results evidenced the importance of old-growth forests of eucalyptus for the maintenance of ant's diversity in a region where native vegetation is scarce.Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Universidade de Mogi das Cruzes Núcleo de Ciências Ambientais Laboratório de MirmecologiaUniversidade Estadual Paulista Centro de Estudos de Insetos SociaisUniversidade Estadual Paulista Centro de Estudos de Insetos Sociai

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press