A broad typology of dry rainforests on the western slopes of New South Wales

Dry rainforests are those communities that have floristic and structural affinities to mesic rainforests and occur in parts of eastern and northern Australia where rainfall is comparatively low and often highly seasonal. The dry rainforests of the western slopes of New South Wales are poorly-understood compared to other dry rainforests in Australia, due to a lack of regional scale studies. This paper attempts to redress this by deriving a broad floristic and structural typology for this vegetation type. Phytogeographical analysis followed full floristic surveys conducted on 400 m2 plots located within dry rainforest across the western slopes of NSW. Cluster analysis and ordination of 208 plots identified six floristic groups. Unlike in some other regional studies of dry rainforest these groups were readily assigned to Webb structural types, based on leaf size classes, leaf retention classes and canopy height. Five community types were described using both floristic and structural data: 1) Ficus rubiginosa–Notelaea microcarpa notophyll vine thicket, 2) Ficus rubiginosa–Alectryon subcinereus–Notelaea microcarpa notophyll vine forest, 3) Elaeodendron australe–Notelaea microcarpa–Geijera parviflora notophyll vine thicket, 4) Notelaea microcarpa– Geijera parviflora–Ehretia membranifolia semi-evergreen vine thicket, and 5) Cadellia pentastylis low microphyll vine forest. Floristic groupings were consistent with those described by previous quantitative studies which examined smaller portions of this study area. There was also general agreement between the present analytical study and a previous intuitive classification of dry rainforest vegetation throughout the study area, but little concurrence with a continental scale floristic classification of rainforest

Transitions in the morphological features, habitat use, and diet of young-of-the-year goosefish (Lophius americanus)

This study was designed to improve our understanding of transitions in the early life history and the distribution, habitat use, and diets for young-of-the-year (YOY) goosefish (Lophius americanus) and, as a result, their role in northeastern U.S. continental shelf ecosystems. Pelagic juveniles (>12 to ca. 50 mm total length [TL]) were distributed over most portions of the continental shelf in the Middle Atlantic Bight, Georges Bank, and into the Gulf of Maine. Most individuals settled by 50−85 mm TL and reached approximately 60−120 mm TL by one year of age. Pelagic YOY fed on chaetognaths, hyperiid amphipods, calanoid copepods, and ostracods, and benthic YOY had a varied diet of fishes and benthic crustaceans. Goosefish are widely scattered on the continental shelf in the Middle Atlantic Bight during their early life history and once settled, are habitat generalists, and thus play a role in many continental shelf habi

Preface

Collocated with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), the Educators’ Symposium (EduSymp) focuses on the huge topic of software modeling education ranging from experience reports and case studies to novel pedagogical approaches. In the following, we shortly report on the 6th EduSymp held in October 2010 in Oslo

Position Paper: Software Modeling Education

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a promising paradigm to deal with the ever increasing complexity of modern software systems. Its powerful abstraction mechanisms allow practitioners to focus on the essential development challenges, thereby hiding the irrelevant aspects of the system under development. Within the last few years, noticeable progress has been made in putting MDE into practice,particularly in those areas where the activity of programming is substituted by modeling. The recent availability of matured  concepts and stable tools has resulted in MDE becoming more applicable in software engineering projects. Nevertheless, the availability of the best technology is worthless, if it is not accepted  and used by practitioners in the field. To alleviate this problem there is a need for extensive training both in academia and industry to fully exploit the power of MDE.In this paper, we discuss the efforts being undertaken in the educational communities to promote the application of modeling and MDE technologies and discuss several challenges which still need to be addressed

Which Triggers Produce the Most Erosive, Frequent, and Longest Runout Turbidity Currents on Deltas?

Subaerial rivers and turbidity currents are the two most voluminous sediment transport processes on our planet, and it is important to understand how they are linked offshore from river mouths. Previously, it was thought that slope failures or direct plunging of river floodwater (hyperpycnal flow) dominated the triggering of turbidity currents on delta fronts. Here we reanalyze the most detailed time‐lapse monitoring yet of a submerged delta; comprising 93 surveys of the Squamish Delta in British Columbia, Canada. We show that most turbidity currents are triggered by settling of sediment from dilute surface river plumes, rather than landslides or hyperpycnal flows. Turbidity currents triggered by settling plumes occur frequently, run out as far as landslide‐triggered events, and cause the greatest changes to delta and lobe morphology. For the first time, we show that settling from surface plumes can dominate the triggering of hazardous submarine flows and offshore sediment fluxes

Simplified Onsager theory for isotropic-nematic phase equilibria of length polydisperse hard rods

Polydispersity is believed to have important effects on the formation of liquid crystal phases in suspensions of rod-like particles. To understand such effects, we analyse the phase behaviour of thin hard rods with length polydispersity. Our treatment is based on a simplified Onsager theory, obtained by truncating the series expansion of the angular dependence of the excluded volume. We describe the model and give the full phase equilibrium equations; these are then solved numerically using the moment free energy method which reduces the problem from one with an infinite number of conserved densities to one with a finite number of effective densities that are moments of the full density distribution. The method yields exactly the onset of nematic ordering. Beyond this, results are approximate but we show that they can be made essentially arbitrarily precise by adding adaptively chosen extra moments, while still avoiding the numerical complications of a direct solution of the full phase equilibrium conditions. We investigate in detail the phase behaviour of systems with three different length distributions: a (unimodal) Schulz distribution, a bidisperse distribution and a bimodal mixture of two Schulz distributions which interpolates between these two cases. A three-phase isotropic-nematic-nematic coexistence region is shown to exist for the bimodal and bidisperse length distributions if the ratio of long and short rod lengths is sufficiently large, but not for the unimodal one. We systematically explore the topology of the phase diagram as a function of the width of the length distribution and of the rod length ratio in the bidisperse and bimodal cases.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figure

Preconditioning and triggering of offshore slope failures and turbidity currents revealed by most detailed monitoring yet at a fjord-head delta

Rivers and turbidity currents are the two most important sediment transport processes by volume on Earth. Various hypotheses have been proposed for triggering of turbidity currents offshore from river mouths, including direct plunging of river discharge, delta mouth bar flushing or slope failure caused by low tides and gas expansion, earthquakes and rapid sedimentation. During 2011, 106 turbidity currents were monitored at Squamish Delta, British Columbia. This enables statistical analysis of timing, frequency and triggers. The largest peaks in river discharge did not create hyperpycnal flows. Instead, delayed delta-lip failures occurred 8–11 h after flood peaks, due to cumulative delta top sedimentation and tidally-induced pore pressure changes. Elevated river discharge is thus a significant control on the timing and rate of turbidity currents but not directly due to plunging river water. Elevated river discharge and focusing of river discharge at low tides cause increased sediment transport across the delta-lip, which is the most significant of all controls on flow timing in this setting

Confined coherence in quasi-one-dimensional metals

We present a functional renormalization group calculation of the effect of strong interactions on the shape of the Fermi surface of weakly coupled metallic chains. In the regime where the bare interchain hopping is small, we show that scattering processes involving large momentum transfers perpendicular to the chains can completely destroy the warping of the true Fermi surface, leading to a confined state where the renormalized interchain hopping vanishes and a coherent motion perpendicular to the chains is impossible.Comment: 4 RevTex pages, 5 figures,final version as published by PR

Proof of principle : the adaptive geometry of social foragers

Acknowledgments We thank Cape Nature for permission to undertake the study. We thank Dr Matt Grove and two anonymous referees for comments and suggestions that improved the manuscript substantially. This research was funded by grants from the Leakey Foundation, National Science and Engineering Research Council, Canada to S.P.H. and L.B., and by the National Research Foundation, South Africa to S.P.H. His co-authors dedicate this paper to the memory of P.M.R.C. The authors declare no competing interests.Peer reviewedPostprin

Control via electron count of the competition between magnetism and superconductivity in cobalt and nickel doped NaFeAs

Using a combination of neutron, muon and synchrotron techniques we show how the magnetic state in NaFeAs can be tuned into superconductivity by replacing Fe by either Co or Ni. Electron count is the dominant factor, since Ni-doping has double the effect of Co-doping for the same doping level. We follow the structural, magnetic and superconducting properties as a function of doping to show how the superconducting state evolves, concluding that the addition of 0.1 electrons per Fe atom is sufficient to traverse the superconducting domain, and that magnetic order coexists with superconductivity at doping levels less than 0.025 electrons per Fe atom.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure