Researchers, emergency response and lifeline managers, and municipal planners are beginning to recognize the utility of seismic landslide hazard zonation. With this recognition, the decisions made based on resulting maps could have widespread social and economic impact in the event of a large earthquake. This report compares several popular permanent displacement models for assessing seismic sl...

The extended Kalman filter (EKF) has long been recognized as a powerful, yet computationally intensive, methodology for stochastic parameter estimation. Three improvements to traditional algorithms are presented and applied to heterogeneous transmissivity estimation. First, the costly EKF covariance updates are replaced by more efficient approximations. Second, the zonation structure of the dis...

In this chapter several approaches towards zonation and continuity of biocommunities in streams are analyzed. In older literature, rivers were described in well defined stretches from source to mouth. The biocommunities were described as entities in those stretches. Later, American scientists claimed that a river is a continuum with gradually changing conditions and henceforth gradually changin...

Goudemand et al. replot a subset of our well-constrained data using a new Early Triassic biostratigraphic scheme based on a lower-resolution ammonoid zonation scheme and hypothetical ammonoid-conodont correlation to produce a less distinct seawater temperature history. We dispute their unsubstantiated correlation and, consequently, their allegations.

The strengths of biological processes (e.g., larval settlement, competition, predation, distribution of food resources) and physical factors (e.g., desiccation, freezing, salinity fluctuations) can be correlated with tidal height and may contribute to the vertical zonation of many rocky intertidal organisms. Habitat structural complexity has also been shown to influence the density and diversit...

Forest dynamics in New Zealand are shaped by catastrophic, landscape-level disturbances (e.g. volcanic eruptions, windstorms and fires). The long return-intervals of these disturbances, combined with the longevity of many of New Zealand’s tree species, restrict empirical investigations of forest dynamics. In combination with empirical data (e.g. palaeoecological reconstructions), simulation mod...