130,385 research outputs found
Supportive breeding program of Marble trout (Salmo marmoratus) in the Province of Bolzano - Italy
No full textThe marble trout populations of the Northern Adriatic basin are threatened by human
mediated hybridisation with exotic brown trout. Therefore, conservation measures are urgently needed to counteract further hybridization of this endemic species. The novel supportive breeding program described in this poster, applied within the Province of Bolzano since 2016, aims to conserve the genetic integrity of marble trout, while avoiding both domestication effects and the reduction of effective population size. Local wild marble trout spawners, selected by a genetic screening of each single individual, constitute the basis of the program. To minimize a potential reduction of effective population size induced by supportive breeding, full or partial factorial crossing is conducted. The main part of fertilized eggs is stocked back into the rivers of origin. However, currently it is also a necessary measure to hatch a fraction of the descendants of each trout family under semi-natural conditions. This is done in order to increase the number of available parental fish, and further to be able to provide adequate quantities of fertilised eggs, used for stocking in artificial nests of all river stretches. The genetic screening of wild marble trout (N=578 in 2018) showed a significant hybridization for 80 percent of the phenotypically preselected spawners. The elevated degree of genetic introgression is hampering the here described supportive breeding programs, since it will be more and more difficult to maintain sufficient number of breeders and, in general, pose a serious threat for the conservation of the species within the area of interes
Community patterns of the small riverine benthos within and between two contrasting glacier catchments
No full textEisendle U, Hashold K, Jersabek C, Kirchmair M, Traunspurger W. Community patterns of the small riverine benthos within and between two contrasting glacier catchments. Ecology and Evolution. 2013;3(9):2832-2844
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Do it right or don't do it at all! Genetic screening of S. marmoratus exemplifies the need to revise many or most salmonid conservation and restocking programmes
No full textDemographic collapse of Italian trout populations, owing to the last century freshwater quantitative and qualitative impoverishment, was contrasted by massive stocking of exotic congenerics to sustain angling pressure. After the restoration - or at least regulation - of sustainable water use and management, the envisaged solution to halt population depletion turned out to be the new problem: all native Italian trout populations resulted to be heavily impacted by Atlantic brown trout through hybridisation and genetic introgression. In order to contrast the native trout decline, dozens of projects based on captive breeding programs were then started. Despite a formal general agreement that supportive or supplemental breeding should base on strong genetic data, in order to recover and conserve micro-scale diversity and evolutionary significant units, most breeding programs - sustained by from the smallest local angling association up to the European Community - still exclusively depend on i) morphological selection of breeders, ii) maintenance of captive semi-domesticated breeding stocks, and/or iii) stocking of selected conspecific from different water systems. The outcome of such management actions is, at times, favouring a phenotypic shift of hybrids to the expected or desired morphology patterns, accelerating introgression by fostering the reproduction of hybrids, promoting artificial versus natural selection in non-natural breeding conditions, depleting local biodiversity by mixing and homogenising different management units.
We here report a multi-year case study on a drainage-scale management plan of marble trout (Salmo marmoratus) in the North – East of Italy. We present the outcomes of an extensive genetic screening of breeding stocks derived from different generations of phenotype selection and maintained for supportive breeding, demonstrating all the main limitations of such a scheme; we introduce the shift to supplemental breeding, based on strict genetic evaluation of wild spawners; and we finally show the first evaluation of the qualitative and quantitative effects of this change of pace.
We thus try to exemplify the way to avoid that the foreseen solution to the problem, i.e. conservation projects, will once more translate to the next and final sprint in the race to native trout genomic extinction
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund
No full textAt the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
The R&D Tax Incentives
No full textThis article sets out some background information and reflections of the author on the R&D tax incentive schemes included in the Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB) Proposal. In particular the author analyzes the stimulus to private R&D through ad hoc tax incentives included in the CCTB Proposal and dives into the actual provisions included in the Proposal highlighting the most relevant issues connected with their design and interpretation. Moreover, the author explores the interaction between the CCTB Proposal and the granting by Member States of domestic R&D tax incentives
- …
