1,720,987 research outputs found
Experimental test of the effects of supportive breeding on wild populations
Supportive breeding is currently being used in the management of threatened populations, but the effects of this management strategy remain relatively untested. The common house fly, Musca domestica, was used as a model to assess the relative effectiveness of supportive breeding strategies for endangered species management. Captive populations were subjected to one of two captive breeding treatments, and served as the source of migrants for "wild" populations, which received either 5% or 50% of their total census size from captive migrants each generation. One "wild" population treatment served as a control and received no migrants. Measures of fitness were assessed from each population for nine generations.
Within the captive populations, analyses found highly significant declines in fitness across generations, with much higher total fitness in the equalized breeding strategy as compared to the structured breeding scheme. Captive population fitness did not prove to be a good predictor of "wild" population fitness after reintroduction, but the inbreeding co-efficient of the captive populations were found to be correlated with recipient "wild" population fitness. This suggests that captive breeding programs with goals of future reintroduction to the wild should focus on overall kinship as opposed to fitness levels and make every attempt to minimize the co-efficient of inbreeding within the captive population.
"Wild" populations that received low levels of ideally bred captive migrants performed significantly better than control populations, which received no outside migration. No other "wild" population treatments were found to differ significantly from the control populations, which may be due in part to the small population sizes that limited the effects of selection and migration and strengthened the influence of factors such as genetic drift and inbreeding. It is likely that the constraints of small population size led to the control populations having the lowest overall fitness. Based on this study, it does not appear that sweeping generalizations can be made about the effects of migrant breeding treatment and level of migration on wild populations. Further research is warranted before supportive breeding programs are implemented for a broader range of threatened and endangered species
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We 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
Anoplolepis gracilipes invasion of the Samoan Archipelago: Can mutualisms with native species amplify ecological consequences?
Integrating mutualism into the study of ecological communities is likely to be critical to understanding community dynamics and to predict the consequences of anthropogenic changes to ecosystems. Invasive species are among the greatest of these threats to global biodiversity. Throughout the Pacific, the invasive ant Anoplolepis gracilipes associates mutualistically with Morinda citrifolia , a native plant with extrafloral nectaries (EFN). I tested the hypothesis that these interactions can mediate invader impacts Anoplolepis gracilipes abundances were positively correlated with the dominance of EFN-bearing plants per site and negatively correlated with the species richness of native ants. Additionally, A. gracilipes displayed a higher magnitude of responses to nectar than other dominant ants. Mutualisms also had significant impacts on the structure of arthropod communities. These effects were strongest when A. gracilipes dominated local ant assemblages. These results suggest that novel mutualisms between invasive and native species can facilitate the impacts of invasions on communities
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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