Increasing human dominance of tropical forests

Tropical forests house over half of Earth’s biodiversity and are an important influence on the climate system. These forests are experiencing escalating human influence, altering their health and the provision of important ecosystem functions and services. Impacts started with hunting and millennia-old megafaunal extinctions (Phase I), continuing via low-intensity shifting cultivation (Phase II), to today’s global integration (Phase III), dominated by intensive permanent agriculture, industrial logging, and attendant fires and fragmentation. Such ongoing pressures together with an intensification of global environmental change may severely degrade forests in the future (Phase IV, global simplification) unless new ‘development without destruction’ pathways are established alongside climate change resilient landscape designs

Real-space imaging of confined magnetic skyrmion tubes

Abstract: Magnetic skyrmions are topologically nontrivial particles with a potential application as information elements in future spintronic device architectures. While they are commonly portrayed as two dimensional objects, in reality magnetic skyrmions are thought to exist as elongated, tube-like objects extending through the thickness of the host material. The study of this skyrmion tube state (SkT) is vital for furthering the understanding of skyrmion formation and dynamics for future applications. However, direct experimental imaging of skyrmion tubes has yet to be reported. Here, we demonstrate the real-space observation of skyrmion tubes in a lamella of FeGe using resonant magnetic x-ray imaging and comparative micromagnetic simulations, confirming their extended structure. The formation of these structures at the edge of the sample highlights the importance of confinement and edge effects in the stabilisation of the SkT state, opening the door to further investigation into this unexplored dimension of the skyrmion spin texture

Effects of ecosystem protection on scallop populations within a community-led temperate marine reserve

This study investigated the effects of a newly established, fully protected marine reserve on benthic habitats and two commercially valuable species of scallop in Lamlash Bay, Isle of Arran, United Kingdom. Annual dive surveys from 2010 to 2013 showed the abundance of juvenile scallops to be significantly greater within the marine reserve than outside. Generalised linear models revealed this trend to be significantly related to the greater presence of macroalgae and hydroids growing within the boundaries of the reserve. These results suggest that structurally complex habitats growing within the reserve have substantially increased spat settlement and/or survival. The density of adult king scallops declined threefold with increasing distance from the boundaries of the reserve, indicating possible evidence of spillover or reduced fishing effort directly outside and around the marine reserve. However, there was no difference in the mean density of adult scallops between the reserve and outside. Finally, the mean age, size, and reproductive and exploitable biomass of king scallops were all significantly greater within the reserve. In contrast to king scallops, the population dynamics of queen scallops (Aequipecten opercularis) fluctuated randomly over the survey period and showed little difference between the reserve and outside. Overall, this study is consistent with the hypothesis that marine reserves can encourage the recovery of seafloor habitats, which, in turn, can benefit populations of commercially exploited species, emphasising the importance of marine reserves in the ecosystem-based management of fisheries

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

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

Chemical pharmacology of the benzo [b] thiophene and 1-methylindole analogs of N,N-dimethyltryptamine

This document only includes an excerpt of the corresponding thesis or dissertation. To request a digital scan of the full text, please contact the Ruth Lilly Medical Library's Interlibrary Loan Department ([email protected])

Mineral resource information in support of national, regional and local planning : West Yorkshire (comprising Metropolitan Boroughs of Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield and City of Leeds)

This report is one of a series prepared by the British Geological Survey for various administrative areas in England for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s research project Mineral Resource Information in Support of National, Regional and Local Planning. The accompanying map relates to West Yorkshire, comprising the Metropolitan Boroughs of Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield and the City of Leeds, and delineates the mineral resources of current, or potential, economic interest in the area and the sites where minerals are, or have been, worked. It also relates these to national planning designations, which may represent constraints on the extraction of minerals. Three major elements of information are presented: • the geological distribution and importance of mineral resources; • the extent of mineral planning permissions and the location of current mineral workings; and • the extent of selected, nationally-designated planning constraints. This wide range of information, much of which is scattered and not always available in a consistent and convenient form, is presented on a digitally-generated summary map on the scale of 1:100 000. This scale is convenient for the overall display of the data and allows for a legible topographic base on which to depict the information. However, all the data are held digitally at larger scales using a Geographical Information System (GIS), which allows easy revision, updating and customisation of the information together with its possible integration with other datasets. The information will form part of a Summary of the Mineral Resources of the Yorkshire and the Humber Region