Asiatic Wild Asses in the Literature: What Do We Need to Know Now?

Asiatic wild asses were once found across central Asia, but over time their range has been reduced until today all subspecies are under threat. This paper examined the literature about wild asses with an aim to illustrating gaps in our knowledge as a target for future research. A search was made on BIOSIS ISI for the following strings: Equus hemionus, wild ass, khulan, kulan, kiang, khur, and onager. In total 61 relevant references were found, published between 1900 and 2005. Most of these references were published in the 1990s, with only one published between 1900 and 1970. Khur and khulan were most under-represented in the literature with only five and two citations respectively resulting from these key words. When put into subjective categories most papers published (28) were on the conservation, behavior or ecology of Asiatic wild asses. All physiology papers dealt with captive animals, and nearly half of all genetics papers focused on onagers. Very little was published on the habitat use of wild asses and there was almost nothing on the distribution of subspecies, or genetic differences between them. This research highlighted the importance of key words and consistent nomenclature. We need to focus more on the ecology of wild populations, in particular examining habitat use, social structure and distribution. In addition it is very important that more is published on threats to these animals so that action can be taken in time

Emerging Tools to Control Feral Horse Populations in the Western USA

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been conducting research to support the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program since 1996 and is currently engaged in testing additional tools to curb high population growth of feral horses. Horses are protected by the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 and are managed to maintain populations at appropriate management level (AML). With no natural predators, many populations double in 4-5 years. Population size is controlled primarily with “gathers” in which horses are rounded up and made available for adoption by the public. This is a costly enterprise in which animals are housed in holding facilities while they await potential adoption and many horses are never adopted. Today ~48,000 horses remain in holding facilities across the USA, and facilities are now full. There are approximately 72,000 horses on public lands across the west, which is almost 3 times range wide AML. Horses have profound impacts on habitat and other wildlife, and the situation is becoming critical on western landscapes. With holding facilities at capacity, BLM is forced to leave excess animals on public lands, leading to rangeland degradation and impacts to sage grouse and other wildlife. Solutions are needed quickly to address exponential population growth of horses. USGS partnered with Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Colorado State University (CSU), respectively, to conduct studies testing the efficacy of intrauterine devices (IUD) for horses, and gelding a proportion of males in a population. The IUD study was conducted on 20 domestic mares that were housed with stallions at OSU. Fifteen mares retained IUDs for the 18-month duration of the trial before IUDs were removed. Mares who received progesterone at the time of IUD insertion retained their IUDs, and no mares with an IUD became pregnant. Next we will test IUDs in free-roaming mares. In the gelding study with CSU, there were no differences in individual behavior or movement rates between gelded and non-gelded harem stallions or bachelors after the first breeding season. Gelded harem stallions did not lose their mares at a higher rate than intact stallions, and mares joined gelded harem stallions as often as they joined intact stallions. Preliminary results indicate little if any change to social structure or individual behavior of stallions or mares compared to controls. We will determine after the summer 2019 birthing season if gelding males affects population growth rate. USGS proposed a field study to determine behavior and population growth reduction of sterilizing mares but the study was litigated and postponed. Modeling by USGS indicates sterilization is the most effective and promising tool to reduce herds to AML and would potentially save BLM \u3e$1 billion annually in direct operational costs. The environmental cost to habitat and other wildlife associated with keeping excess horses on the range, as well as direct economic costs, have not yet been calculated for comparison

How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure its success, we used a Delphi expert elicitation method to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993 - 2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010 - 2020 (the timing of Aichi Target 12). We found that conservation prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993, and 9–18 bird and 2–7 mammal extinctions since 2010. Many remain highly threatened, and may still become extinct in the near future. Nonetheless, given that ten bird and five mammal species did go extinct (or are strongly suspected to) since 1993, extinction rates would have been 2.9–4.2 times greater without conservation action. While policy commitments have fostered significant conservation achievements, future biodiversity action needs to be scaled up to avert additional extinctions

Body size and digestive system shape resource selection by ungulates : a cross-taxa test of the forage maturation hypothesis

The forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) states that energy intake for ungulates is maximised when forage biomass is at intermediate levels. Nevertheless, metabolic allometry and different digestive systems suggest that resource selection should vary across ungulate species. By combining GPS relocations with remotely sensed data on forage characteristics and surface water, we quantified the effect of body size and digestive system in determining movements of 30 populations of hindgut fermenters (equids) and ruminants across biomes. Selection for intermediate forage biomass was negatively related to body size, regardless of digestive system. Selection for proximity to surface water was stronger for equids relative to ruminants, regardless of body size. To be more generalisable, we suggest that the FMH explicitly incorporate contingencies in body size and digestive system, with small-bodied ruminants selecting more strongly for potential energy intake, and hindgut fermenters selecting more strongly for surface water.DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The dataset used in our analyses is available via Dryad repository (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jsxksn09f) following a year-long embargo from publication of the manuscript. The coordinates associated with mountain zebra data are not provided in an effort to protect critically endangered black rhino (Diceros bicornis) locations. Interested researchers can contact the data owner (Minnesota Zoo) directly for inquiries.https://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/elehj2022Mammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog

How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?

Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contains the aim to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure the degree to which this was achieved, we used expert elicitation to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993–2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010–2020 (the timing of Aichi Target 12). We found that conservation action prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993, and 9–18 bird and two to seven mammal extinctions since 2010. Many remain highly threatened and may still become extinct. Considering that 10 bird and five mammal species did go extinct (or are strongly suspected to) since 1993, extinction rates would have been 2.9–4.2 times greater without conservation action. While policy commitments have fostered significant conservation achievements, future biodiversity action needs to be scaled up to avert additional extinctions.https://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/conlMammal Research Institut

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

DUNE Offline Computing Conceptual Design Report

This document describes Offline Software and Computing for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) experiment, in particular, the conceptual design of the offline computing needed to accomplish its physics goals. Our emphasis in this document is the development of the computing infrastructure needed to acquire, catalog, reconstruct, simulate and analyze the data from the DUNE experiment and its prototypes. In this effort, we concentrate on developing the tools and systems that facilitate the development and deployment of advanced algorithms. Rather than prescribing particular algorithms, our goal is to provide resources that are flexible and accessible enough to support creative software solutions as HEP computing evolves and to provide computing that achieves the physics goals of the DUNE experiment.This document describes the conceptual design for the Offline Software and Computing for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). The goals of the experiment include 1) studying neutrino oscillations using a beam of neutrinos sent from Fermilab in Illinois to the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, 2) studying astrophysical neutrino sources and rare processes and 3) understanding the physics of neutrino interactions in matter. We describe the development of the computing infrastructure needed to achieve the physics goals of the experiment by storing, cataloging, reconstructing, simulating, and analyzing $\sim$ 30 PB of data/year from DUNE and its prototypes. Rather than prescribing particular algorithms, our goal is to provide resources that are flexible and accessible enough to support creative software solutions and advanced algorithms as HEP computing evolves. We describe the physics objectives, organization, use cases, and proposed technical solutions

DUNE Offline Computing Conceptual Design Report

This document describes Offline Software and Computing for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) experiment, in particular, the conceptual design of the offline computing needed to accomplish its physics goals. Our emphasis in this document is the development of the computing infrastructure needed to acquire, catalog, reconstruct, simulate and analyze the data from the DUNE experiment and its prototypes. In this effort, we concentrate on developing the tools and systems thatfacilitate the development and deployment of advanced algorithms. Rather than prescribing particular algorithms, our goal is to provide resources that are flexible and accessible enough to support creative software solutions as HEP computing evolves and to provide computing that achieves the physics goals of the DUNE experiment