Sensitivity of the grassland-forest ecotone in East African open woodland savannah to historical rainfall variation

Abstract. Fossil pollen records provide key insight into the sensitivity of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change at longer time scales. However, tracing vegetation response to relatively modest historical climate fluctuations is often complicated by the overriding signature of anthropogenic landscape disturbance. Here we use high-resolution pollen data from a ~200 year lake-sediment record in open woodland savannah of Queen Elisabeth National Park (southwestern Uganda) to assess the sensitivity of the tropical lowland grassland-forest ecotone to historical fluctuations in annual rainfall on the order of 10% lasting several decades. Specifically we trace vegetation response to three episodes of increased regional rainfall dated to the 1820s–1830s, ca. 1865–1890 and from 1962 to around 2000. During inferred wetter episodes we find increases in the relative pollen abundance from trees and shrubs of moist semi-deciduous forest (Allophylus, Macaranga, Celtis, Alchornea), riparian forest (Phoenix reclinata) and savannah woodland (Myrica, Acalypha, Combretaceae/Melostomataceae) as well as local savannah taxa (Acacia, Rhus type vulgaris, Ficus), together creating strong temporary reductions in Poaceae pollen (to 45–55% of the terrestrial pollen sum). During intervening dry episodes, most notably the period ca. 1920–1962, Poaceae pollen attained values of 65–75%, and dryland herbs such as Commelina, Justicia type odora and Chenopodiaceae expanded at the expense of Asteraceae, Solanum-type, Swertia usumbarensis-type, and (modestly so) Urticaceae. Noting that the overall diversity of arboreal taxa remained high but their combined abundance low, we conclude that the landscape surrounding Lake Chibwera has been an open woodland savannah throughout the past 200 years, with historical rainfall variation exerting modest effects on local tree cover (mostly the abundance of Acacia and Ficus) and the prevalence of damp soil areas promoting Phoenix reclinata. The strong apparent expansion of true forest trees during wet episodes can be explained partly by enhanced pollen influx via upland streams. Pollen from exotic trees and other cultural indicators appears from the 1970s onwards, but their combined influence fails to mask the region's natural vegetation dynamics. </jats:p

Our Immaculate

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Multiplicative structures of the immaculate basis of non-commutative symmetric functions

We continue our development of a new basis for the algebra of non-commutative symmetric functions. This basis is analogous to the Schur basis for the algebra of symmetric functions, and it shares many of its wonderful properties. For instance, in this article we describe non-commutative versions of the Littlewood-Richardson rule and the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule. A surprising relation develops among non-commutative Littlewood-Richardson coefficients, which has implications to the commutative case. Finally, we interpret these new coefficients geometrically as the number of integer points inside a certain polytope.Comment: 30 pages: we cleaned and fixed many details in the proofs. The interested reader may toggle \specialcomments in the TeX file to reveal 6 added pages of details and ideas (in red

Quantum limits on probabilistic amplifiers

An ideal phase-preserving linear amplifier is a deterministic device that adds to an input signal the minimal amount of noise consistent with the constraints imposed by quantum mechanics. A noiseless linear amplifier takes an input coherent state to an amplified coherent state, but only works part of the time. Such a device is actually better than noiseless, since the output has less noise than the amplified noise of the input coherent state; for this reason we refer to such devices as immaculate. Here we bound the working probabilities of probabilistic and approximate immaculate amplifiers and construct theoretical models that achieve some of these bounds. Our chief conclusions are the following: (i) The working probability of any phase-insensitive immaculate amplifier is very small in the phase-plane region where the device works with high fidelity; (ii) phase-sensitive immaculate amplifiers that work only on coherent states sparsely distributed on a phase-plane circle centered at the origin can have a reasonably high working probability

A lift of the Schur and Hall-Littlewood bases to non-commutative symmetric functions

We introduce a new basis of the non-commutative symmetric functions whose commutative images are Schur functions. Dually, we build a basis of the quasi-symmetric functions which expand positively in the fundamental quasi-symmetric functions and decompose Schur functions. We then use the basis to construct a non-commutative lift of the Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions with similar properties to their commutative counterparts.Comment: new version includes edits, references to forthcoming research, and a 'hook-length' formula for the number of standard immaculate tableau

Ancient origin and maternal inheritance of blue cuckoo eggs

Maternal inheritance via the female-specific W chromosome was long ago proposed as a potential solution to the evolutionary enigma of co-existing host-specific races (or 'gentes') in avian brood parasites. Here we report the first unambiguous evidence for maternal inheritance of egg colouration in the brood-parasitic common cuckoo Cuculus canorus. Females laying blue eggs belong to an ancient (∼2.6 Myr) maternal lineage, as evidenced by both mitochondrial and W-linked DNA, but are indistinguishable at nuclear DNA from other common cuckoos. Hence, cuckoo host races with blue eggs are distinguished only by maternally inherited components of the genome, which maintain host-specific adaptation despite interbreeding among males and females reared by different hosts. A mitochondrial phylogeny suggests that blue eggs originated in Asia and then expanded westwards as female cuckoos laying blue eggs interbred with the existing European population, introducing an adaptive trait that expanded the range of potential hosts

Partnership experiences in developing the Preparation for Tertiary Learning course in the Teachers in Training programme.

This article is a collection of three partnership voices: Roselyn Maneipuri, Immaculate Runialo and Noeline Wright. The first two, lecturers in the Arts and Languages Department at the School of Education (SOE), Honiara, Solomon Islands, found themselves working with a New Zealander who was tasked with helping them review and develop new courses for a new cohort of teacher education students. The three had never met before, but within about three weeks had to build a professional relationship, build some contextual understanding, establish what elements the course needed, and develop it in time for Roselyn and Immaculate to teach the first cohort of students (currently teaching in schools but without any teacher education background), who were due to arrive in less than three months' time