Rarity of monodominance in hyperdiverse Amazonian forests.

Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence of monodominance in a massive, basin-wide database of forest-inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network (ATDN). Utilizing a simple defining metric of at least half of the trees ≥ 10 cm diameter belonging to one species, we found only a few occurrences of monodominance in Amazonia, and the phenomenon was not significantly linked to previously hypothesized life history traits such wood density, seed mass, ectomycorrhizal associations, or Rhizobium nodulation. In our analysis, coppicing (the formation of sprouts at the base of the tree or on roots) was the only trait significantly linked to monodominance. While at specific locales coppicing or ectomycorrhizal associations may confer a considerable advantage to a tree species and lead to its monodominance, very few species have these traits. Mining of the ATDN dataset suggests that monodominance is quite rare in Amazonia, and may be linked primarily to edaphic factors

Testing of tritium breeder blanket activation foil spectrometer during JET operations

Accurate measurement of the nuclear environment within a test tritium breeding-blanket module of a fusion reactor is crucial to determine tritium production rates which are relevant to self-sufficiency of tritium fuel supply, tritium accountancy and also to the evaluation of localised power levels produced in blankets. This requires evaluation of the time-dependent spectral neutron flux within the test tritium breeding-blanket module under harsh radiation and temperature environments. The application of an activation foil-based spectrometer system to determine neutron flux density using a pneumatic transfer system in ITER has been studied, deployed and tested on the Joint European Torus (JET) machine in a recent deuterium - deuterium campaign for a selection of high purity activation foils. Deployment of the spectrometer system has provided important functional and practical testing of the detector measurement system, associated hardware and post processing techniques for the analysis of large data sets produced through the use of list mode data collection. The testing is invaluable for the optimisation of systems for future planned testing in tritium - tritium and deuterium - tritium conditions. Analysis of the time and energy spectra collected to date and the status of the development of methods for post processing are presented in this paper