Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as a transformative tool for applied ecology, conservation and biodiversity monitoring, but its potential contribution to fundamental ecology is less ...often discussed, and fundamental PAM studies tend to be descriptive, rather than mechanistic.
Here, we chart the most promising directions for ecologists wishing to use the suite of currently available acoustic methods to address long‐standing fundamental questions in ecology and explore new avenues of research. In both terrestrial and aquatic habitats, PAM provides an opportunity to ask questions across multiple spatial scales and at fine temporal resolution, and to capture phenomena or species that are difficult to observe. In combination with traditional approaches to data collection, PAM could release ecologists from myriad limitations that have, at times, precluded mechanistic understanding.
We discuss several case studies to demonstrate the potential contribution of PAM to biodiversity estimation, population trend analysis, assessing climate change impacts on phenology and distribution, and understanding disturbance and recovery dynamics. We also highlight what is on the horizon for PAM, in terms of near‐future technological and methodological developments that have the potential to provide advances in coming years.
Overall, we illustrate how ecologists can harness the power of PAM to address fundamental ecological questions in an era of ecology no longer characterised by data limitation.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Effective control of plant disease remains a key challenge. Eradication attempts often involve removal of host plants within a certain radius of detection, targeting asymptomatic infection. Here we ...develop and test potentially more effective, epidemiologically motivated, control strategies, using a mathematical model previously fitted to the spread of citrus canker in Florida.
We test risk-based control, which preferentially removes hosts expected to cause a high number of infections in the remaining host population. Removals then depend on past patterns of pathogen spread and host removal, which might be nontransparent to affected stake-holders. This motivates a variable radius strategy, which approximates risk-based control via removal radii that vary by location, but which are fixed in advance of any epidemic.
Risk-based control outperforms variable radius control, which in turn outperforms constant radius removal. This result is robust to changes in disease spread parameters and initial patterns of susceptible host plants. However, efficiency degrades if epidemiological parameters are incorrectly characterised.
Risk-based control including additional epidemiology can be used to improve disease management, but it requires good prior knowledge for optimal performance. This focuses attention on gaining maximal information from past epidemics, on understanding model transferability between locations and on adaptive management strategies that change over time.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Biodiversity–stability relationships have frequently been studied in ecology, with the recent integration of traits to explain community stability over time. Classical theory underlying the ...biodiversity–stability relationship posits that different species' responses to the environment should stabilise community‐level properties (e.g. biomass or abundance) through compensatory dynamics.
However, functional response traits, which aim to predict how species respond to environmental change, are still rarely integrated into studies of ecological stability. Such traits should mechanistically drive community stability, both in terms of community abundance (functional variability) and composition (compositional variability). In turn, whether and how functional or compositional stability scales to affect temporal variation in functional effect traits (a proxy for ecosystem functioning) remains largely unknown, but is key to consistent ecosystem functioning under environmental change.
Here, we explore the diversity–stability relationship in bird communities using annual survey data across 98 sites in central Romania, in combination with global trait databases and structural equation models. We show that higher response trait diversity promotes compositional variability directly, and functional variability indirectly via species asynchrony. In turn, functional variability impacts the temporal stability of effect trait diversity. Multiple facets of diversity and community stability differ between natural forests and agricultural or human‐dominated survey sites, and the relationship between response diversity and functional variability is mediated by land cover.
Further integration of response‐and‐effect trait frameworks into studies of community stability will enhance understanding of the drivers of biodiversity change, allowing targeted conservation decision‐making with a focus on stable ecosystem functioning in the face of global environmental change.
A response–effect trait framework was used to investigate how the community stability of Romanian birds is mediated through species asynchrony, and its impact on the stability of ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, the study determines the impact of land cover on the biodiversity–stability relationship, with implications for sustainable land management.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Induced pluripotent stem cell‐derived human hepatocyte‐like cells (iHeps) could provide a powerful tool for studying the mechanisms underlying human liver development and disease, testing the ...efficacy and safety of pharmaceuticals across different patients (i.e., personalized medicine), and enabling cell‐based therapies in the clinic. However, current in vitro protocols that rely upon growth factors and extracellular matrices (ECMs) alone yield iHeps with low levels of liver functions relative to adult primary human hepatocytes (PHHs). Moreover, these low hepatic functions in iHeps are difficult to maintain for prolonged times (weeks to months) in culture. Here, we engineered a micropatterned coculture (iMPCC) platform in a multiwell format that, in contrast to conventional confluent cultures, significantly enhanced the functional maturation and longevity of iHeps in culture for at least 4 weeks in vitro when benchmarked against multiple donors of PHHs. In particular, iHeps were micropatterned onto collagen‐coated domains of empirically optimized dimensions, surrounded by 3T3‐J2 murine embryonic fibroblasts, and then sandwiched with a thin layer of ECM gel (Matrigel). We assessed iHep maturity by global gene expression profiles, hepatic polarity, secretion of albumin and urea, basal cytochrome P450 (CYP450) activities, phase II conjugation, drug‐mediated CYP450 induction, and drug‐induced hepatotoxicity. Conclusion: Controlling both homotypic interactions between iHeps and heterotypic interactions with stromal fibroblasts significantly matures iHep functions and maintains them for several weeks in culture. In the future, iMPCCs could prove useful for drug screening, studying molecular mechanisms underlying iHep differentiation, modeling liver diseases, and integration into human‐on‐a‐chip systems being designed to assess multiorgan responses to compounds. (Hepatology 2015;61:1370–1381)
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 was hailed as revolutionary legislation, but in the ensuing years restrictive Supreme Court decisions have prompted accusations that the ...Court has betrayed the disability rights movement. The ADA can lay claim to notable successes, yet people with disabilities continue to be unemployed at extremely high rates. In this timely book, Samuel R. Bagenstos examines the history of the movement and discusses the various, often-conflicting projects of diverse participants. He argues that while the courts deserve some criticism, some may also be fairly aimed at the choices made by prominent disability rights activists as they crafted and argued for the ADA. The author concludes with an assessment of the limits of antidiscrimination law in integrating and empowering people with disabilities, and he suggests new policy directions to make these goals a reality.
Biomolecular condensates form via coupled associative and segregative phase transitions of multivalent associative macromolecules. Phase separation coupled to percolation is one example of such ...transitions. Here, we characterize molecular and mesoscale structural descriptions of condensates formed by intrinsically disordered prion-like low complexity domains (PLCDs). These systems conform to sticker-and-spacers architectures. Stickers are cohesive motifs that drive associative interactions through reversible crosslinking and spacers affect the cooperativity of crosslinking and overall macromolecular solubility. Our computations reproduce experimentally measured sequence-specific phase behaviors of PLCDs. Within simulated condensates, networks of reversible inter-sticker crosslinks organize PLCDs into small-world topologies. The overall dimensions of PLCDs vary with spatial location, being most expanded at and preferring to be oriented perpendicular to the interface. Our results demonstrate that even simple condensates with one type of macromolecule feature inhomogeneous spatial organizations of molecules and interfacial features that likely prime them for biochemical activity.
Radiocarbon dating of the earliest occupational phases at the Cooper's Ferry site in western Idaho indicates that people repeatedly occupied the Columbia River basin, starting between 16,560 and ...15,280 calibrated years before the present (cal yr B.P.). Artifacts from these early occupations indicate the use of unfluted stemmed projectile point technologies before the appearance of the Clovis Paleoindian tradition and support early cultural connections with northeastern Asian Upper Paleolithic archaeological traditions. The Cooper's Ferry site was initially occupied during a time that predates the opening of an ice-free corridor (≤14,800 cal yr B.P.), which supports the hypothesis that initial human migration into the Americas occurred via a Pacific coastal route.
•A deep learning method is proposed using different optimizers and transfer learning to classify Pneumonia patients.•Preparing a dataset of around 5300 X-ray images for pneumonia detection.•The ...proposed deep transfer learning method is trained on a benchmark open dataset of chest x-ray images.•Presenting the optimization results, precision, recall, accuracy, and F1-score for proposed method.•In proposed method achieve better accuracy in the detection rate than other techniques.
Pneumonia is a disease that leads to the death of individuals within a short period since the flow of fluid in the lungs. Hence, initial diagnosis and drugs are very important to avoid the progress of the disease. This paper proposes a novel deep learning approach for automatic detection of pneumonia using deep transfer learning to simplify the detection process with improved accuracy. This work was aimed to preprocess the input chest X-ray images to identify the presence of pneumonia using U-Net architecture based segmentation and classifies the pneumonia as normal and abnormal (Bacteria, viral) using pre-trained on ImageNet dataset models such as ResNet50, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2. Besides, to extract the efficient features and improve accuracy of pre-trained models two optimizers, namely, Adam and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) used and its performances are analyzed with batch sizes of 16 and 32. Based on the values obtained, the performances of undertaken pre-trained models are analyzed and compared with other Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models such as DenseNet-169+SVM, VGG16, RetinaNet + Mask RCNN, VGG16 and Xception, Fully connected RCNN, etc using various measures. From the results observed that the proposed ResNet50 model work achieved 93.06% accuracy, 88.97 % precision rate, 96.78% Recall rate and 92.71% F1-score rate, which than is higher than the other models aforementioned.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The classical MacArthur–Wilson theory of island biogeography (TIB) emphasizes the role of island area and isolation in determining island biotas, but is neutral with respect to species differences ...that could affect community assembly and persistence. Recent extensions of island biogeography theory address how functional differences among species may lead to non‐random community assembly processes and different diversity–area scaling patterns. First, the trophic TIB considers how diversity scaling varies across trophic position in a community, with species at higher trophic levels being most strongly influenced by island area. Second, further extensions have predicted how trait distributions, and hence functional diversity, should scale with area. Trait‐based theory predicts richness‐corrected functional diversity should be low on small islands but converge to null on larger islands. Conversely, competitive assembly predicts high diversity on small islands converging to null with increasing size.
However, despite mounting interest in diversity–area relationships across different dimensions of diversity, these predictions derived from theory have not been extensively tested across taxa and island systems.
Here, we develop and test predictions of the trophic TIB and extensions to functional traits, by examining the diversity–area relationship across multiple trophic ranks and dimensions of avian biodiversity in the Ryūkyū archipelago of Japan.
We find evidence for a positive species– and phylogenetic diversity–area relationship, but functional diversity was not strongly affected by island area. Counter to the trophic TIB, we found no differences in the slopes of species–area relationships among trophic ranks, although slopes varied among trophic guilds at the same rank. We revealed differential assembly of trophic ranks, with evidence of trait‐based assembly of intermediate predators but otherwise neutral community assembly.
Our results suggest that niche space differs among trophic guilds of birds, but that differences are mostly not predicted by current extensions of island biogeography theory. While predicted patterns do not fit the empirical data well in this case, the development of such theory provides a useful framework to analyse island patterns from new perspectives. The application of empirical datasets such as ours should help provide a basis for developing further iterations of island biogeography theory.
The authors test the trophic and functional dimensions of island biogeography empirically for birds across a continental archipelago and examine community assembly of birds across trophic levels. They find that theory is only partly supported in this system and suggest further developments may be required.
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There is growing interest regarding the role of the right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) during a particular form of executive control referred to as response inhibition. However, tasks used to ...examine neural activity at the point of response inhibition have rarely controlled for the potentially confounding effects of attentional demand. In particular, it is unclear whether the RIFG is specifically involved in inhibitory control, or is involved more generally in the detection of salient or task relevant cues. The current fMRI study sought to clarify the role of the RIFG in executive control by holding the stimulus conditions of one of the most popular response inhibition tasks–the Stop Signal Task–constant, whilst varying the response that was required on reception of the stop signal cue. Our results reveal that the RIFG is recruited when important cues are detected, regardless of whether that detection is followed by the inhibition of a motor response, the generation of a motor response, or no external response at all.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
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