When doing research on a certain topic, most of us look to the internet as it’s a fast and easy way of accessing many documents and papers. A lot of the information we find online is Open Access. This means that it’s free material that does not contain licensing barriers to allow one to access it. Open Access material can be many things such as article and journals that we can easily find online.
Although an article may be Open Access, this still means that proper citation and credit must be given to the author of the article when writing a research paper, for example. When citing a document, it is necessary to look at the metadata: information about the specific document. Metadata includes the author of the document, the date it was released and other important information regarding the document (another example is file size which is less relevant to creating proper citations).
Some documents we find online may not be open access, meaning we would need special permission to access them. Some authors prefer to have a Creative Commons License. This means that they are able to share their work but only o a select group of individuals. The license also controls on who is able to distribute the work. An example of this would be reports that are released in journals where only subscribers to the journal are able to view it. As students at York University, we have been granted access to view a lot of articles in journals that would not be open access to an average person.
An interesting open access article in the journal of Nature Communications explores the effect of fragmentation on Amazonian forest canopies. With the use of LiDAR scanning, the scientists observed the canopy cover during the seasons of old growth forests in the Amazon. It was observed that when maximum daily temperatures reached 35C, the upper canopy lost plant material (Nunes et al. 2022). This then resulted in an increase in plant material I the lower canopy as there was an increase in available light. At forest edges, found in fragmented ecosystems, there was an increase in average temperatures which led to persistent upper canopy loss, uncommon in most parts of the forest. This is an interesting article to read as we see how the natural ecosystem is altered and effected by fragmentation from human effects such as the building of roads and clearcutting.
Nunes, M.H., Camargo, J.L.C., Vincent, G. et al. Forest fragmentation impacts the seasonality of Amazonian evergreen canopies. Nat Commun 13, 917 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28490-7
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 