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1. A method for long‐term retention of pop‐up satellite archival tags ( PSATs ) on small migratory fishes

   https://doi.org/10.1111/jfb.15351  

   Naisbett‐Jones, Lewis C.; Branham, Creed; Birath, Shayla; Paliotti, Savannah; McMains, Andrew R.; Joel Fodrie, Frederick; Morley, James W.; Buckel, Jeffrey A.; Lohmann, Kenneth J. (May 2023, Journal of Fish Biology)

   Abstract Achieving long‐term retention of pop‐up satellite archival tags (PSATs) has proven difficult for all fishes but is particularly challenging for small migrant species due to the relatively large size of tags. In this study, the authors tested the latest and smallest PSAT model on the market, the mark‐report satellite tag (mrPAT), and developed a simple, cost‐effective method of tag attachment on sheepshead Archosargus probatocephalus (Walbaum 1792), a small marine fish. During laboratory trials, the method of tag attachment used in this study outperformed the existing methods with two c . 40 cm fish retaining their tags for 3 months (the duration of the laboratory study). During field deployments, data were successfully obtained for 17 of the 25 tagged fish [37–50 cm fork length (FL)]. Of these, 14 tags (82%) remained on the fish until the pre‐programmed release date resulting in tag retention times of up to 172 days (mean: 140 days). The investigation represents the first extensive study into the feasibility of PSATs for monitoring fishes in this size range. The authors demonstrate that their method of attachment and this latest PSAT model are feasible for c . 5‐month deployments on fishes that are relatively small ( c . 45 cm FL). These results with A. probatocephalus represent a potentially significant advance in PSAT methodology for fishes of this size. Future investigations are needed to determine if this method is transferrable to other species in the same size range. 

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2. Evaluation of Seven Part-of-Speech Taggers in Tagging Building Codes: Identifying the Best Performing Tagger and Common Sources of Errors

   Xue, X; Zhang, J. (January 2020, ASCE Construction Research Congress 2020)

   As the number, size and complexity of building construction projects increase, code compliance checking becomes more challenging because of the time-consuming, costly, and error-prone nature of a manual checking process. A fully automated code compliance checking would be desirable in facilitating a more efficient, cost effective, and human error-proof code checking. Such automation requires automated information extraction from building designs and building codes, and automated information transformation to a format that allows automated reasoning. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important technology to support such automated processing of building codes, because building codes are represented in natural language texts. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, as an important basis of NLP tasks, must have a high performance to ensure the quality of the automated processing of building codes in such a compliance checking system. However, no systematic testing of existing POS taggers on domain specific building codes data have been performed. To address this gap, the authors analyzed the performance of seven state-of-the-at POS taggers on tagging building codes and compared their results to a manually-labeled gold standard. The authors aim to: (1) find the best performing tagger in terms of accuracy, and (2) identify common sources of errors. In providing the POS tags, the authors used the Penn Treebank tagset, which is a widely used tagset with a proper balance between conciseness and information richness. An average accuracy of 88.80% was found on the testing data. The Standford coreNLP tagger outperformed the other taggers in the experiment. Common sources of errors were identified to be: (1) word ambiguity, (2) rare words, and (3) unique meaning of common English words in the construction context. The found result of machine taggers on building codes calls for performance improvement, such as error-fixing transformational rules and machine taggers that are trained on building codes. 

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3. Women's Syntactic Resilience and Men's Grammatical Luck: Gender-Bias in Part-of-Speech Tagging and Dependency Parsing

   Garimella, Aparna; Banea, Carmen; Hovy, Dirk; Mihalcea, Rada (January 2019, Association for Computational Linguistics)

   Several linguistic studies have shown the prevalence of various lexical and grammatical patterns in texts authored by a person of a particular gender, but models for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing have still not adapted to account for these differences. To address this, we annotate the Wall Street Journal part of the Penn Treebank with the gender information of the articles' authors, and build taggers and parsers trained on this data that show performance differences in text written by men and women. Further analyses reveal numerous part-of-speech tags and syntactic relations whose prediction performances benefit from the prevalence of a specific gender in the training data. The results underscore the importance of accounting for gendered differences in syntactic tasks, and outline future venues for developing more accurate taggers and parsers. We release our data to the research community. 

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4. Best practices for instrumenting honey bees

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16168-5  

   Koenig, Phoebe A.; Petersen, Kirstin H. (July 2022, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Honey bees are vital pollinators and can be used to monitor the landscape. Consequently, interest in mounting technologies onto bees to track foraging behaviors is increasing. The barrier to entry is steep, in part because the methodology for fastening tags to bees, and the success rates, are often missing from publications. We tested six factors suspected to influence the presence and tag retention rates of nurse honey bees after their introduction to hives, and followed bees until foraging age. We also compared reintroducing foragers to their maternal colony using the best method for nurse bees to releasing them in front of their maternal hive and allowing them to fly back unaided. Nurses were most likely to be present in the hive with their tag still attached when introduced using an introduction cage at night. Glue type was important, but may further be influenced by tag material. Foragers were most likely to be present with a tag attached if released in front of their colony. Preparation and introduction techniques influence the likelihood of tagged honey bee survival and of the tags remaining attached, which should be considered when executing honey bee tagging and tracking experiments. 

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5. Survival of Florida Largemouth Bass in a Coastal Refuge Habitat across Years of Varying Drying Severity

   https://doi.org/10.1002/tafs.10274  

   Pierce, Jessica_L; Lauretta, Matthew_V; Rezek, Ryan_J; Rehage, Jennifer_S (June 2021, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society)

   Abstract In aquatic systems, refuge habitats increase resistance to drying events and maintain populations in disturbed environments. However, reduced water availability and altered flow regimes threaten the function of these habitats. We conducted a capture–mark–recapture study, integrating angler citizen science. Our objectives were to quantify variation in survival of Florida Largemouth BassMicropterus salmoides floridanusin a coastal refuge habitat across seasonal hydrological periods and over 4 years of varying drying severity and to determine the contribution of angler sampling to improving capture probabilities. Apparent survival of Florida Largemouth Bass in the coastal Everglades was highest in wet and drying periods and lowest in dry and reflooding periods. Interannual survival was closely tied to the length of upstream marsh drying, with the lowest observed survival (0.21) during a drought year. The inclusion of angler sampling improved recapture probabilities, suggesting that angler data can supplement standardized electrofishing sampling. Findings show that during short drying events Florida Largemouth Bass survival can be relatively high, with implications for Everglades restoration. Understanding the ability of refuge habitats to buffer populations from drying disturbance is a key component for conservation and restoration, particularly under climate change scenarios. 

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