Holocene Timberline Fluctuations and Climate Variability Alpine life and landscapes are exposed to extreme environmental conditions. Avalanches, landslides and floods, due to extreme climatic events such as heavy snow and rain storms, can impact both wild and managed landscapes. Above timberline, climatic conditions are so harsh that they impede the growth of trees. According to one recent hypo...

The US Advanced Limiter-divertor Plasma-facing Systems (ALPS) program is developing the science of liquid metal surface divertors for near and long term tokamaks. These systems may help solve the demanding heat removal, particle removal, and erosion issues of fusion plasma/surface interactions. ALPS combines tokamak experiments, lab experiments, and modeling. We are designing both static and fl...

The connection between groups and recursive (un)decidability has a long history, going back to the early 1900s. Also, various polynomial-time algorithms have been known in group theory for a long time. However the impact of more general computational complexity (e.g., NP-completeness or PSpace-completeness) has been relatively small and recent. These lectures review a sampling of older facts ab...

The Pilosella alpicola group comprises four morphologically distinct and geographically vicariant alpine taxa. We performed a thorough herbarium revision and literature survey to infer their distributional pattern(s). Pilosella alpicola s.s. occurs in the Alps in two disjunct areas: the Swiss Valais Alps and the Italian Dolomites. Historical records come also from the Austrian Alps (Gurktaler A...

Alkyllysophospholipids (ALPs) inhibit the proliferation of epithelial cancer cells, and may achieve this by perturbing a number of intracellular signaling pathways. p70 S6 kinase (p70S6K) is a key intracellular signaling molecule in the regulation of cell proliferation. We therefore investigated whether ALPs inhibit p70S6K activity and, if so, whether this may be relevant in the mechanism of in...

Alternative livelihood project (ALP) is a widely used term for interventions that aim to reduce the prevalence of activities deemed to be environmentally damaging by substituting them with lower impact livelihood activities that provide at least equivalent benefits. ALPs are widely implemented in conservation, but in 2012, an International Union for Conservation of Nature resolution called for ...

Approximate linear programs (ALPs) are well-known models for computing value function approximations (VFAs) for high dimensional Markov decision processes (MDPs) arising in business applications. VFAs from ALPs have desirable theoretical properties, define an operating policy, and provide a lower bound on the optimal policy cost, which can be used to assess the suboptimality of heuristic polici...

Ongoing atmospheric warming causes rapid shrinking of glaciers in the European Alps, with a high chance of their near-complete disappearance by the end of the 21st century. Here we present a comparison of three independent approaches to model the possible evolution of the glaciers in the Swiss Alps over the 21st century. The models have different levels of complexity, work at a regional scale a...

Tree-ring width and glacier mass balance are two highly sensitive climatic proxies which are often used as indicators of biological and geophysical changes in highaltitude ecosystems. Tree-ring data have been widely used to reconstruct past temperatures and also to reconstruct past glacier mass balance. Here we show that tree-ring chronologies from a high-altitude Pinus cembra L. dendroclimatic...

AIM Understanding the stability of realized niches is crucial for predicting the responses of species to climate change. One approach is to evaluate the niche differences of populations of the same species that occupy regions that are geographically disconnected. Here, we assess niche conservatism along thermal gradients for 26 plant species with a disjunct distribution between the Alps and the...