Vegetation and Lepidoptera in Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests. Community structure along climate zones, forest succession and seasonality in the Southern Yucatán, Mexico

Seasonally dry tropical forests are worldwide recognized as important ecosystems for biodiversity conservation. Increasing agricultural activities (e.g., slash-and-burn agriculture) leads to a heterogeneous landscape matrix; and as ecological succession takes over in abandoned fields, plant and animal communities endure shifts in species richness and composition. This book presents the analysis on plant and Lepidoptera (caterpillar) communities and their species turnover along forest succession and along a gradient from dry to humid seasonal forests in the Southern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. We discuss the contribution of climate zones, forest age and seasonality to the comunity structure of plant and Lepidoptera assemblages. The study of these environmental gradients may serve to understand and forecast future changes in species diversity in response to increasing human activities and climate change. This book aims to encourage comprehensive research in the field of community ecology of plants and insects, and will also be of interest to those working in conservation, land use management and climate change in seasonally dry tropical forests

Measuring Effectiveness of Teams and Multi-team Systems in Operation

Military operations have evidently become more complex. The development toward multi-service, multi-national operations with teams often functioning in larger systems of teams is one of the complexities commanders have to deal with. Therefore commanders need not only to gain and maintain insight in the effectiveness of single teams but also in the performance of the multi-team system as a whole. The Command Team Effectiveness instrument is a diagnostic instrument for commanders to assess within team aspects, processes and effectiveness (Essens et al., 2005). We extended this instrument to include a module on multi-team system characteristics and cross team processes. Furthermore, we developed a simple support system for easy data collection, processing data, and reporting to improve the usability of the instrument in the operational context. The support system is currently being used in a Naval-Marines mission (Atalanta, 2009). We will discuss the strengths and limitations of using the support system for measurement of staff processes during operational missions

Improving the commanders' speed and agility in decision-making

In het project "Decision Support Tools" zijn twee typen beslisondersteuningsconcepten ontwikkeld en getest, een Simulatie tool (CFSim) en een Critical Thinking Tool (CTT). Dit artikel beschrijft de ontwikkeling van de twee concepten, het experiment en de resultaten van het experiment