The influence of diversity on the measurement of functional impairment : An international validation of the Amsterdam IADL questionnaire in 8 countries

Peer reviewe

Biological Invasions in Conservation Planning: A Global Systematic Review

Mačić, Vesna ... et al.-- 13 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, supplementary material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00178/full#supplementary-materialBiological invasions threaten biodiversity in terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, requiring substantial conservation and management efforts. To examine how the conservation planning literature addresses biological invasions and if planning in the marine environment could benefit from experiences in the freshwater and terrestrial systems, we conducted a global systematic review. Out of 1,149 scientific articles mentioning both “conservation planning” and “alien” or any of its alternative terms, 70 articles met our selection criteria. Most of the studies were related to the terrestrial environment, while only 10% focused on the marine environment. The main conservation targets were species (mostly vertebrates) rather than habitats or ecosystems. Apart from being mentioned, alien species were considered of concern for conservation in only 46% of the cases, while mitigation measures were proposed in only 13% of the cases. The vast majority of the studies (73%) ignored alien species in conservation planning even if their negative impacts were recognized. In 20% of the studies, highly invaded areas were avoided in the planning, while in 6% of the cases such areas were prioritized for conservation. In the latter case, two opposing approaches led to the selection of invaded areas: either alien and native biodiversity were treated equally in setting conservation targets, i.e., alien species were also considered as ecological features requiring protection, or more commonly invaded sites were prioritized for the implementation of management actions to control or eradicate invasive alien species. When the “avoid” approach was followed, in most of the cases highly impacted areas were either excluded or invasive alien species were included in the estimation of a cost function to be minimized. Most of the studies that followed a “protect” or “avoid” approach dealt with terrestrial or freshwater features but in most cases the followed approach could be transferred to the marine environment. Gaps and needs for further research are discussed and we propose an 11-step framework to account for biological invasions into the systematic conservation planning designThis article was undertaken in the framework of COST Action 15121 “Advancing marine conservation in the European and contiguous seas” (MarCons; http://www.marcons-cost.eu; Katsanevakis et al., 2017)—supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology, CA15121)Peer reviewe

Modelling the role of alien species and fisheries in an Eastern Mediterranean insular shelf ecosystem

20 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, 1 appendixWe developed a trophic mass-balance model to describe the structure and functioning of the insular shelf ecosystem of the Republic of Cyprus and assess the impact of fishing and alien species during the mid-2010s. A total of 40 functional groups were defined, ranging from producers and detritus to top predators and when possible, alien species were included in exclusively alien groups. All fishing activities in the area were considered. Input data were obtained from local surveys, fishery statistics, published data on stomach content analyses, other scientific and grey literature, as well as empirical equations. Results show that the ecosystem shares common structural and functional characteristics with other Mediterranean ones, especially those in the eastern basin. Fishing has noticeable impacts on the ecosystem and based on the results, 7.1% of the total primary production is required to sustain fisheries. The model predicts a strong negative impact of small-scale fisheries on small sharks and turtles, and of recreational fisheries on the large demersal and pelagic fishes. Our results also highlight the significant role of alien species within the ecosystem. Alien fish accounted for 29% of fish production. Negative impacts of alien fish were predicted, in particular by alien siganids on phytobenthos, and some alien demersal fishes on eels and morays. This is the first food-web model for Cyprus and results are discussed and compared to other Mediterranean modelsThis work is part of the first author's PhD Thesis and a contribution to the Research Project “PROTOMEDEA - Towards the establishment of Marine Protected Area Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean”, supported by the DG for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries of the European Commission, through the Grant Agreement SI2.721917Peer Reviewe

Electronic and interface properties of polyfluorene films on GaN for hybrid optoelectronic applications

Electronic and interface properties of spin-coated poly(9,9- dioctylfluorenyl-2,7-diyl) (PFO) films on GaN have been investigated in terms of their potential for optoelectronic applications. The PFO/GaN interface was studied by photoemission spectroscopy showing a type-II energy alignment with band offsets suitable for efficient photocurrent generation. The light harvesting potential is further supported by fluorescence experiments that show evidence of photo-induced electron transfer from PFO to GaN. The impact of polymer film thickness was probed using emission anisotropy and ellipsometry, indicating the presence of an ordered planar phase of PFO. The study has implications to hybrid optoelectronic devices employing the two important materials

Advances and challenges in modelling the impacts of invasive alien species on aquatic ecosystems

28 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, electronic supplementary materialInvasive alien species (IAS) have become an important driver of biodiversity change and exert severe pressure on natural ecosystems. The development of modelling approaches to assess and predict their distributions and impacts, and evaluate management options has increased substantially. We reviewed these modelling approaches, applied in aquatic ecosystems, using a systematic review approach in line with the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. According to our results, multispecies/ecosystem models dominated the applications, with dynamic and non-spatial models being the most prevalent. Most of the models included an additional stressor, mainly fisheries, climate change or nutrient loading. The impacts on biota focused on predation, but also on competition and ecosystem functioning, while the impacts on ecosystem services focused on food provision and water purification. At species/population level, most of the studies reported negative impacts; while at multispecies/ecosystem level, negative and both negative and positive impacts were similarly represented. We reflect on the ability of current models to assess different impacts of IAS populations and highlight the need to advance their capabilities to predict future impacts. Further development of models that allow capturing the arrival, establishment and spread of IAS and assess their impacts in an integrated way is still needed. Spatial–temporal modelling techniques bridging with novel analytical capabilities (such as environmental DNA to investigate the presence of IAS and metabarcoding and machine learning to predict future trophic behavior and distributions) may be the key for future achievementXC and EO were supported by an IOLR scholarship under the DESSIM project (“A Decision Support System for the management of Israel’s Mediterranean Exclusive Economic Zone”). MC was partially funded by the European Commission through the European Union´s Horizon research program Grant Agreement No. 689518 for the MERCES project. This study was partially funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action 15121 “Advancing marine conservation in the European and contiguous seas” (MarCons—http://www.marcons-cost.eu/; Katsanevakis et al. (2017))—supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for research and innovationWith the funding support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S), of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI

N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification

Current news datasets merely focus on text features on the news and rarely leverage the feature of images, excluding numerous essential features for news classification. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, N24News, which is generated from New York Times with 24 categories and contains both text and image information in each news. We use a multitask multimodal method and the experimental results show multimodal news classification performs better than text-only news classification. Depending on the length of the text, the classification accuracy can be increased by up to 8.11%. Our research reveals the relationship between the performance of a multimodal classifier and its sub-classifiers, and also the possible improvements when applying multimodal in news classification. N24News is shown to have great potential to prompt the multimodal news studies.</p