Gaps in terrestrial soundscape research: It's time to focus on tropical wildlife.

There has been a body of research examining the sounds produced in landscapes. These sounds are commonly defined as soundscapes, however, the term is often used in different contexts. To understand the various meanings attributed to soundscapes, we identified how soundscapes are represented in the scientific literature and identified current knowledge gaps in soundscape research focusing on terrestrial environments. We conducted a quantitative review of published papers with the keyword soundscape available at Web of Science and Scopus databases. A total of 1309 abstracts and a subset of about 5% (N = 68) complete papers and reviews published from 1985 to 2017 were read and analysed, identifying types of sound, types of environment and focal species studied, as well as study regions and climates. By identifying the current focus of research, we also identified gaps and research opportunities. Research was biased towards temperate regions, terrestrial environments, and the impacts on humans in urban areas. Although most of the world's biodiversity is concentrated in tropical wilderness areas, these regions had fewer studies attributed to them. Given the importance of tropical landscapes for biodiversity conservation, we strongly suggest that more research should be undertaken in the tropics, with a particular focus on wildlife in these regions. Furthermore, soundscape research (methods and tools) should increasingly target the anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, including behavioural and physiological changes, alongside the current focus on human-sound interactions and the approach used by bioacoustics methods.

Meteorological variables and mosquito monitoring are good predictors for infestation trends of Aedes aegypti, the vector of dengue, chikungunya and Zika.

BACKGROUND: Aedes aegypti is an important vector for arboviroses and widely distributed throughout the world. Climatic factors can influence vector population dynamics and, consequently, disease transmission. The aim of this study was to characterize the temporal dynamics of an Ae. aegypti population and dengue cases and to investigate the relationship between meteorological variables and mosquito infestation. METHODS: We monitored and analyzed the adult female Ae. aegypti population, the dengue-fever vector, in Porto Alegre, a subtropical city in Brazil using the MI-Dengue system (intelligent dengue monitoring). This system uses sticky traps to monitor weekly infestation indices. We fitted generalized additive models (GAM) with climate variables including precipitation, temperature and humidity, and a GAM that additionally included mosquito abundance in the previous week as an explanatory variable. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the effect of adult mosquito infestation on the probability of dengue occurrence. RESULTS: Adult mosquito abundance was strongly seasonal, with low infestation indices during the winters and high infestation during the summers. Weekly minimum temperatures above 18 °C were strongly associated with increased mosquito abundance, whereas humidity above 75% had a negative effect on abundance. The GAM model that included adult mosquito infestation in the previous week adjusted and predicted the observed data much better than the model which included only meteorological predictor variables. Dengue was also seasonal and 98% of all cases occurred at times of high adult Ae. aegypti infestation. The probability of dengue occurrence increased by 25%, when the mean number of adult mosquitos caught by monitoring traps increased by 0.1 mosquitoes per week. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that continuous monitoring of dengue vector population allows for more reliable predictions of infestation indices. The adult mosquito infestation index was a good predictor of dengue occurrence. Weekly adult dengue vector monitoring is a helpful dengue control strategy in subtropical Brazilian cities.

GAPs in the study of zoo and wild animal welfare.

To investigate the science of animal welfare for zoo and wild animals in the period from 1966 to 2007, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of abstracts downloaded from The Web of Science((c)) database using the keyword combination "Animal welfare, Zoo* and wild" in the topic field. In total we downloaded 1,125 abstracts, which were classified into the following categories: year of publication; environment of the study (e.g., zoo) or theoretical; area of knowledge (e.g., conservation in situ); number of experimental animals used; species; addresses of authors; taxonomic classification; publication language; journal name; number of citations received. Since 1990, there has been a rapid increase in the number of articles published in this area of animal welfare. One worrying result was that published articles were predominately of a theoretical nature (58.65%, N=563). Most of the articles were published by authors either in Europe (47.43%, N=480) or North America (37.65%, N=381) and written in English (87.71%, N=971). The majority of experimental studies were conducted with mammals (75.92%, N=391), and had small sample sizes (N=7 for zoo-based studies). In terms of impact factor (IF), the journals in this study had a median factor equivalent to that for the area of biological sciences (median IF=1.013). Little knowledge cross-over from farm animal welfare was found (only four articles) in this study. In conclusion, zoo and wild animal welfare as a science may benefit from a greater interaction with farm animal welfare.