Storage effect theory describes conditions under which recruitment fluctuation can promote the coexistence of multiple species competing for a single resource. In communities of benthic marine animals, larval settlement is often highly variable, and it has long been suspected that settlement variability promotes coexistence via the storage effect, but no empirical studies have provided quantita...

Acquiring the information for rural settlement timely and accurately has an important significance for construction and development of rural areas. The development of remote sensing technology provides advanced means of the acquirement of the information of settlement. The study of extracting rural settlement information from Quickbird images in Xindu district, Chengdu City, P.R.of China was di...

Despite debuting to little fanfare under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), dispute settlement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been called the “backbone of the multilateral trading system.” Indeed, whereas GATT dispute settlement could scarcely have seemed more flawed, the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) is widely touted for boosting confidence in an in...

Spatially extensive analysis of satellite, climate, and census data reveals humanenvironment interactions of regional or continental concern i n the United States. A grid-based principal components analysis of Bureau of Census variables revealed two independent demographic phenomena, a-settlement reflecting traditional human settlement patterns and p-settlement describing relative population gr...

Due to the scarcity of useable land in Hong Kong, it is a common practice to reclaim land from the sea. The reclaimed land usually undergoes a long period of settlement that may affect building structures and underground facilities such as water supply and sewage systems built on the land. Measurements of land settlement can provide valuable data for assessing the impacts of land settlement and...

Large value payment and securities settlement systems are important components of an economy's nancial system. Many such systems are operated by central banks and are liquidity intensive. Central banks often provide inexpensive liquidity to facilitate settlement. This leads to a number of policy questions about the provision of such liquidity. To answer these questions, central banks need to un...

For sessile marine invertebrates with complex life cycles, habitat choice is directed by the larval phase. Defining which habitat-linked cues are implicated in sessile invertebrate larval settlement has largely concentrated on chemical cues which are thought to signal optimal habitat. There has been less effort establishing physical settlement cues, including the role of surface microtopography...

Granular materials are widely used in industrial processes despite their complex and poorly understood mechanical behaviour both in static and dynamic regimes. A prototypical example is the settlement and compaction of a granular bed under vibrational loading. The elementary mechanisms of this process are still unclear and there is presently no established theory or methodology to predict the s...

iii Foreword The network of domestic and cross-border systems that comprise the global payment and settlement infrastructure has evolved significantly over recent years. These systems, like the financial markets and economies they support, are increasingly connected through a wide array of complex interrelationships. As a result, the smooth functioning of an individual system often depends on t...

New recruits of the bluehead wrasse Thalassoma bifasciatum were censused and collected from nearshore reefs of Barbados, West Indies, every 2 weeks for 20 months. Their temporal coincidence with low salinity (<34 5) water during their pelagic larval stage was determined by comparing the otolith records of new recruits with conductivity and temperature records from a current meter moored 2 km of...