CP Studies and Non-Standard Higgs Physics

There are many possibilities for new physics beyond the Standard Model that feature non-standard Higgs sectors. These may introduce new sources of CP violation, and there may be mixing between multiple Higgs bosons or other new scalar bosons. Alternatively, the Higgs may be a composite state, or there may even be no Higgs at all. These non-standard Higgs scenarios have important implications for collider physics as well as for cosmology, and understanding their phenomenology is essential for a full comprehension of electroweak symmetry breaking. This report discusses the most relevant theories which go beyond the Standard Model and its minimal, CP-conserving supersymmetric extension: two-Higgs-doublet models and minimal supersymmetric models with CP violation, supersymmetric models with an extra singlet, models with extra gauge groups or Higgs triplets, Little Higgs models, models in extra dimensions, and models with technicolour or other new strong dynamics. For each of these scenarios, this report presents an introduction to the phenomenology, followed by contributions on more detailed theoretical aspects and studies of possible experimental signatures at the LHC and other colliders.Comment: Report of the CPNSH workshop, May 2004 - Dec 2005, 542 pages. The complete report as well as its individual chapters are also available from http://kraml.home.cern.ch/kraml/cpnsh/report.htm

European Vegetation Archive: now EVA really starts!

European Vegetation Archive (EVA) was announced as a new initiative of the European Vegetation Survey at the EVS Meeting in Vienna in 2012. The aim of EVA is to create a centralized database of European vegetation plots by storing copies of national and regional databases on a single software platform using a unified taxonomic reference database. EVA does not affect the ongoing independent developments of source data­ bases and it guarantees that data property rights of the original contributors are re­ spected. EVA Data Property and Governance Rules were approved and the EVA website (www.euroveg.org/eva­database) was established in 2012. Since then several European vegetation­plot databases joined EVA. In the framework of the parallel Braun­Blanquet project, we obtained experience with handling multiple databases based on different taxonomies, and a prototype of Turboveg 3 was developed as a software tool for joint management of multiple databases. This prototype has recently been accepted as the platform for technical management of EVA according to the approved Rules. A spe­ cific challenge for EVA is joining multiple species lists with different taxonomies used in national and regional databases. To solve this issue, EVA took over the SynBioSys Taxon Database, developed earlier for the SynBioSys Europe project, which is a system of taxon names and concepts used in the individual databases and their matches to a unified list of European flora. This taxon database is currently being extended to ac­ count for new vegetation­plot databases and revised by taxonomic experts working in a newly established EVA Taxonomic Advisory Board. These technical developments made it possible that after two years since its formal establishment, first data sets could be uploaded to EVA, forming a basis for large­scale analyses of European vegeta­ tion diversity for both scientific purposes and applications

European Vegetation Archive: now EVA really starts!

European Vegetation Archive (EVA) was announced as a new initiative of the European Vegetation Survey at the EVS Meeting in Vienna in 2012. The aim of EVA is to create a centralized database of European vegetation plots by storing copies of national and regional databases on a single software platform using a unified taxonomic reference database. EVA does not affect the ongoing independent developments of source data­ bases and it guarantees that data property rights of the original contributors are re­ spected. EVA Data Property and Governance Rules were approved and the EVA website (www.euroveg.org/eva­database) was established in 2012. Since then several European vegetation­plot databases joined EVA. In the framework of the parallel Braun­Blanquet project, we obtained experience with handling multiple databases based on different taxonomies, and a prototype of Turboveg 3 was developed as a software tool for joint management of multiple databases. This prototype has recently been accepted as the platform for technical management of EVA according to the approved Rules. A spe­ cific challenge for EVA is joining multiple species lists with different taxonomies used in national and regional databases. To solve this issue, EVA took over the SynBioSys Taxon Database, developed earlier for the SynBioSys Europe project, which is a system of taxon names and concepts used in the individual databases and their matches to a unified list of European flora. This taxon database is currently being extended to ac­ count for new vegetation­plot databases and revised by taxonomic experts working in a newly established EVA Taxonomic Advisory Board. These technical developments made it possible that after two years since its formal establishment, first data sets could be uploaded to EVA, forming a basis for large­scale analyses of European vegeta­ tion diversity for both scientific purposes and applications

sPlot:a new tool for global vegetation analyses

Abstract Aims: Vegetation‐plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co‐occurring in the same community. Vegetation‐plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level. Results: sPlot version 2.1 contains records from 1,121,244 vegetation plots, which comprise 23,586,216 records of plant species and their relative cover or abundance in plots collected worldwide between 1885 and 2015. We complemented the information for each plot by retrieving climate and soil conditions and the biogeographic context (e.g., biomes) from external sources, and by calculating community‐weighted means and variances of traits using gap‐filled data from the global plant trait database TRY. Moreover, we created a phylogenetic tree for 50,167 out of the 54,519 species identified in the plots. We present the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community‐weighted means of key traits. Conclusions: The availability of vegetation plot data in sPlot offers new avenues for vegetation analysis at the global scale