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Simple Summary: The reduviid genus Sycanus Amyot & Serville, 1843, possesses higher aesthetic value and plays a crucial role as a natural enemy in the control of agricultural and forestry pests. However, Sycanus from China has not undergone a comprehensive review for over four decades. Based on both molecular data and morphological evidence, we conducted a systematic review of the 14 Chinese Sycanus species, including a description of three new species. Due to the variability of body coloration and morphological similarity among closely related species, unresolved issues and debates still persist in the taxonomic study of the genus Sycanus from China. In this study, we conducted phylogenetic analyses and species delimitation for Sycanus in China based on a COI DNA barcoding dataset comprising 81 samples. The results revealed that all the samples could be classified into 12 species by integrating molecular analyses with morphological comparison. This paper provides a comprehensive systematic review of the Sycanus species found in China, including descriptions of three new species: S. taiwanensis Zhao & Cai sp. nov., S. flavicorius Li & Cai sp. nov., and S. hainanensis Wang & Cai sp. nov. Furthermore, it is proposed that S. croceovittatus Dohrn, 1859, S. leucomesus Walker, 1873, and S. villicus Stål, 1863, are three synonyms of S. bifidus (Fabricius, 1787); S. bicolor Hsiao, 1979, is a synonym of S. versicolor Dohrn, 1859; and S. hsiaoi Maldonado-Capriles, 1990, is a synonym of S. marginellus Putshkov, 1987. Additionally, brief biological information is provided for two species, S. falleni Stål, 1863, and S. croceus Hsiao, 1979. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Adults of stoneflies have diverse mating behaviors and complex signals for communication, but they are not always able to correctly recognize their mates. With the observations from several provinces of China, we provide the first study on the erroneous mating behaviors of stoneflies from this country. Three different categories of erroneous mating attempts involving 13 species belonging to three stonefly families are reported, and information on their physical competition, the sensorial mechanisms triggering the mating, the conditions favoring the mating mistakes, and the possible consequences of interspecific mating are discussed. Hitting and pushing with the head and abdomen could be the unique method employed in the male–male physical competition. Vibrational signals are considered not a prerequisite for triggering a mating behavior, while vision and/or touch could be a sufficient condition for triggering it, but they are not always efficient for species-specific recognition. Currently, information on the biology of Plecoptera from China is scarce, particularly on mating behavior. In this paper, the existence of mating mistakes (erroneous mating attempts) involving 13 Chinese stonefly species (belonging to nine genera and three families) is reported. These erroneous mating behaviors can be included into three different categories: mating attempts between conspecific males (including the formation of erroneous mating balls), mating attempts between different taxa (including displacement attempts during copulation), and mating-related behaviors with non-living objects. From these behaviors, some aspects of stoneflies during mating, such as the physical competition between males, the sensorial mechanisms implied in triggering a mating behavior, the conditions favoring the mating mistakes, and the possible consequences of interspecific mating in the hybrid production, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a review of the genus Brachytrycherus Arrow from mainland China. Three new species are described and illustrated: B. bipunctatus Chang & Bi, sp. nov., B. denticulatus Chang & Bi, sp. nov., and B. humeralis Chang & Bi, sp. nov. The diagnosis, distribution, type locality, biology, and ecology are provided for each species. A key to the species of Brachytrycherus known in China is updated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eucommia ulmoides Oliver, a single species of Eucommia genus belonging to the Eucommiaceae family, is an endemic in China and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for nearly two thousand years. Records from different historical periods highlight E. ulmoides and its officinal botanical parts, usefulness in adaptation to disease and its central role in Chinese medicine theory. There are also historical collection documents for minorities in China. Tearing the leaves, bark and fruit produces strands of latex; a description of E. ulmoides's morphological features is recorded in this paper. This review summarizes 204 natural compounds isolated from this plant, which are divided into seven categories: lignans, iridoids, flavonoids, phenols, steroids, terpenes and others. These components possess wide-ranging pharmacological efficacies, such as antihypertensive, antihyperglycemic, antihyperlipidemia, anti-oxidative, anti-osteoporosis, antitumor, immunomodulatory and neuroprotective activities. This review aims to provide a reference for extensive researches of E. ulmoides crude drugs, especially for quality control, biosynthesis and structure modification of active ingredients and pharmacological mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specimen identification keys are still the most commonly created tools used by systematic biologists to access biodiversity information. Creating identification keys requires analyzing and synthesizing large amounts of information from specimens and their descriptions and is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming activity. Automating the generation of identification keys from text descriptions becomes a highly attractive text mining application in the biodiversity domain. Fine-grained semantic annotation of morphological descriptions of organisms is a necessary first step in generating keys from text. Machine-readable ontologies are needed in this process because most biological characters are only implied (i.e., not stated) in descriptions. The immediate question to ask is “How well do existing ontologies support semantic annotation and automated key generation?” With the intention to either select an existing ontology or develop a unified ontology based on existing ones, this paper evaluates the coverage, semantic consistency, and inter-ontology agreement of a biodiversity character ontology and three plant glossaries that may be turned into ontologies. The coverage and semantic consistency of the ontology/glossaries are checked against the authoritative domain literature, namely, Flora of North America and Flora of China. The evaluation results suggest that more work is needed to improve the coverage and interoperability of the ontology/glossaries. More concepts need to be added to the ontology/glossaries and careful work is needed to improve the semantic consistency. The method used in this paper to evaluate the ontology/glossaries can be used to propose new candidate concepts from the domain literature and suggest appropriate definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paper was published in JBE in 2001 which examined the background of the education reform launched in 2000 in Hong Kong, and reviewed existing practices as well as beliefs in science and biology assessment among secondary teachers in Hong Kong. The direction of the reform was to take the emphasis away from public examinations as the sole evaluation of student learning, and encourage alternative forms of assessment. After two years of effort from the project team, changes in teachers' practices and beliefs about science and biology assessment are observed. Having described the progress and development made, this paper charts out future directions for teacher development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shrubs and subshrubs can tolerate wider ranges of moisture stresses in both soil and air than other plant life forms, and thus represent greater nonlinearity and uncertainty in ecosystem physiology. The objectives of this paper are to model shrub/subshrub stomatal conductance by synthesizing the field leaf gas exchanges data of 24 species in China, in order to detect the differences between deciduous shrubs and Artemisia subshrubs in their responses of stomatal conductance to changes in the moisture stresses. We revised a model of stomatal conductance by incorporating the tradeoff between xylem hydraulic efficiency and cavitation loss risk. We then fit the model at the three hierarchical levels: global (pooling all data as a single group), three functional groups (deciduous non-legume shrubs, deciduous legume shrubs, and subshrubs in Artemisia genus), and individual observations (species × sites). Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo method was applied to obtain the model parameters at the three levels. We found that the model at the level of functional groups is a significant improvement over that at the global level, indicating the significant differences in the stomatal behavior among the three functional groups. The differences in tolerance and sensitivities to changes in moisture stresses are the most evident between the shrubs and the subshrubs: The two shrub groups can tolerate much higher soil water stress than the subshrubs. The analysis at the observation level is also a significant improvement over that at the functional group level, indicating great variations within each group. Our analysis offered a clue for the equivocal issue of shrub encroachment into grasslands: While the invasion by the shrubs may be irreversible, the dominance of subshrubs, due to their lower resistance and tolerance to moisture stresses, may be put down by appropriate grassland management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern logistics operations, large-scale logistics companies, besides active participation in profit-seeking commercial business, also play an essential role during an emergency relief process by dispatching urgently-required materials to disaster-affected areas. Therefore, an issue has been widely addressed by logistics practitioners and caught researchers' more attention as to how the logistics companies achieve maximum commercial profit on condition that emergency tasks are effectively and performed satisfactorily. In this paper, two vehicle scheduling models are proposed to solve the problem. One is a prediction-related scheme, which predicts the amounts of disaster-relief materials and commercial business and then accepts the business that will generate maximum profits; the other is a priority-directed scheme, which, firstly groups commercial and emergency business according to priority grades and then schedules both types of business jointly and simultaneously by arriving at the maximum priority in total. Moreover, computer-based simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of these two models by comparing them with two traditional disaster-relief tactics in China. The results testify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several approaches have been proposed for near real-time detection and prediction of the spread of influenza. These include search query data for influenza-related terms, which has been explored as a tool for augmenting traditional surveillance methods. In this paper, we present a method that uses Internet search query data from Baidu to model and monitor influenza activity in China. The objectives of the study are to present a comprehensive technique for: (i) keyword selection, (ii) keyword filtering, (iii) index composition and (iv) modeling and detection of influenza activity in China. Sequential time-series for the selected composite keyword index is significantly correlated with Chinese influenza case data. In addition, one-month ahead prediction of influenza cases for the first eight months of 2012 has a mean absolute percent error less than 11%. To our knowledge, this is the first study on the use of search query data from Baidu in conjunction with this approach for estimation of influenza activity in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate incidence forecasting of infectious disease is critical for early prevention and for better government strategic planning. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of different forecasting methods based on the monthly incidence of typhoid fever. The seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model and three different models inspired by neural networks, namely, back propagation neural networks (BPNN), radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN), and Elman recurrent neural networks (ERNN) were compared. The differences as well as the advantages and disadvantages, among the SARIMA model and the neural networks were summarized and discussed. The data obtained for 2005 to 2009 and for 2010 from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention were used as modeling and forecasting samples, respectively. The performances were evaluated based on three metrics: mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean square error (MSE). The results showed that RBFNN obtained the smallest MAE, MAPE and MSE in both the modeling and forecasting processes. The performances of the four models ranked in descending order were: RBFNN, ERNN, BPNN and the SARIMA model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: syndromic surveillance system has great advantages in promoting the early detection of epidemics and reducing the necessities of disease confirmation, and it is especially effective for surveillance in resource poor settings. However, most current syndromic surveillance systems are established in developed countries, and there are very few reports on the development of an electronic syndromic surveillance system in resource-constrained settings. Objective: this study describes the design and pilot implementation of an electronic surveillance system (ISS) for the early detection of infectious disease epidemics in rural China, complementing the conventional case report surveillance system. Methods: ISS was developed based on an existing platform ‘Crisis Information Sharing Platform’ (CRISP), combining with modern communication and GIS technology. ISS has four interconnected functions: 1) work group and communication group; 2) data source and collection; 3) data visualization; and 4) outbreak detection and alerting. Results: As of Jan. 31st 2012, ISS has been installed and pilot tested for six months in four counties in rural China. 95 health facilities, 14 pharmacies and 24 primary schools participated in the pilot study, entering respectively 74256, 79701, and 2330 daily records into the central database. More than 90% of surveillance units at the study sites are able to send daily information into the system. In the paper, we also presented the pilot data from health facilities in the two counties, which showed the ISS system had the potential to identify the change of disease patterns at the community level. Conclusions: The ISS platform may facilitate the early detection of infectious disease epidemic as it provides near real-time syndromic data collection, interactive visualization, and automated aberration detection. However, several constraints and challenges were encountered during the pilot implementation of ISS in rural China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explain how individuals’ self-perceived long-term mate value influences their mate preference and mate choice, two hypotheses have been presented, which are “potentials-attract” and “likes-attract”, respectively. The potentials-attract means that people choose mates matched with their sex-specific traits indicating reproductive potentials; and the likes-attract means that people choose mates matched with their own conditions. However, the debate about these two hypotheses still remains unsolved. In this paper, we tested these two hypotheses using a human’s actual mate choice data from a Chinese online dating system (called the Baihe website), where 27,183 users of Baihe website are included, in which there are 590 paired couples (1180 individuals) who met each other via the website. Our main results show that not only the relationship between individuals’ own attributes and their self-stated mate preference but also that between individuals’ own attributes and their actual mate choice are more consistent with the likes-attract hypothesis, i.e., people tend to choose mates who are similar to themselves in a variety of attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Efforts to meet the welfare needs of captive animals (such as the provision of environmental enrichment and naturalistic furnishings) often compromise visitors’ needs (naturalistic exhibits often decrease the visibility of animals on display even though visitors pay to view them). The literature offers different predictions about how zoo visitors respond to decreased animal visibility in naturalistic exhibits but they require further evaluation. Further, visitor research is currently confined to Europe and America and studies outside these areas are limited. This paper investigates the relationships between exhibit naturalism, animal visibility and visitor interest in a Chinese Zoo. Visitor interest was observed at both naturalistic and barren exhibit designs. The study showed that the influence of animal presence on visitor behaviours was similar at both exhibit designs. Further, visitor interest was not compromised at the naturalistic exhibit when animals were not visible. The results demonstrate that the needs of animals and visitors can be balanced at naturalistic exhibits and support the transformation of exhibits to those representing naturalistic environments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Simple Summary: The assassin bugs (Heteroptera: Reduviidae) are one of the largest and morphologically most diverse families of true bug, having essential impacts on forest ecosystems as predators. The spinous reduviid genus Sclomina exhibits shape mimicry and protective coloration adapted to the spinous Rubus plant that they inhabit. The genus Sclomina shows gradual morphological variability, so its morphological classification is still unresolved, and its biology is almost unknown. In this study, DNA barcodes and morphological evidence were combined to accurately divide the species of a comprehensive collection sampled in South China and North Vietnam. We found three cryptic species. The biological information and mimicry behavior uncover their successive evolutionary survival strategies. Sclomina Stål, 1861 (Heteroptera: Reduviidae: Harpactorinae) is endemic to China and Vietnam, with only two species, Sclomina erinacea Stål, 1861 and Sclomina guangxiensis Ren, 2001, characterized by spinous body and dentate abdominal connexivum. However, due to variable morphological characteristics, Sclomina erinacea, which is widely distributed in South China, is possibly a complex of cryptic species, and Sclomina guangxiensis was suspected to be an extreme group of the S. erinacea cline. In the present study, we conducted species delimitation and phylogenetic analyses based on the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene sequences of 307 Sclomina specimens collected from 30 sampling localities combined with morphological evidence. The result showed that all samples used in this study were identified as five species: Sclomina guangxiensis is a valid species, and Sclomina erinacea actually includes three cryptic species: Sclomina xingrensis P. Zhao and Cai sp. nov., Sclomina pallens P. Zhao and Cai sp. nov., and Sclomina parva P. Zhao and Cai sp. nov. In this paper, the genus Sclomina is systematically revised, and the morphological characteristics of the five species are compared, described, and photographed in detail. We elucidate the evolutionary history of Sclomina based on results of estimated divergence time. The body shape and coloration (green in nymph and brown in adult) of Sclomina match their environment and mimic the Rubus plants on which they live. The symbiotic relationship between Sclomina and spinous Rubus plants is presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimation of genetic parameters for growth traits of Gansu Alpine Finewool sheep that separately identify maternal effects has not been previously conducted. (Co)variance components and corresponding genetic parameters for lamb growth traits were estimated from Gansu Alpine Finewool sheep maintained at Gansu Sheep Breeding Technology Extension Station in north-western China. Records of 17,703 lambs at birth, born over 9 years (2000-2008) and sired by 315 rams, were used in the study. Birth type, sex, dam age, record age and birth year were fitted as fixed effects. Analyses were carried out using a restricted maximum likelihood procedure (ASReml). Six different animal models were fitted for all traits and the most appropriate model was selected through log-likelihood ratio testing. After identifying the appropriate model through single-trait analysis, bivariate analyses were used to obtain the phenotypic and genetic correlations among the growth traits. In addition to the direct genetic effect, and maternal genetic effects, significant negative correlations between direct genetic and maternal genetic effects were found for all the growth traits. The maternal permanent environmental effects were only significant for birthweight, weaning weight and pre-weaning growth rate. The estimates of direct heritability for birthweight, weaning weight, pre-weaning average daily gain, post-weaning average daily gain and yearling weight were 0.22, 0.16, 0.15, 0.27 and 0.19 respectively. The maternal heritability estimates were relatively high and ranged from 0.17 to 0.27. The study provides the breed and its associated finewool sheep industry with a more encompassing basis for designing more effective breeding programs for improvement of growth traits of Gansu Alpine Finewool sheep. Genetic parameter estimates for growth traits of Gansu Alpine Finewool sheep that separately identify maternal effects have not previously been conducted. This paper reports the results of a study of more than 17000 lambs from the Gansu Sheep Breeding Technology Station in north-western China. The study provides the breed and its associated industry with a more encompassing basis for the design and implementation of genetic improvement programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]