Vertical zonation of intertidal organisms, from the shallow subtidal to the supralittoral zones, is a ubiquitous feature of temperate and tropical rocky shores. Organisms that live higher on the shore experience larger daily and seasonal fluctuations in microhabitat conditions, due to their greater exposure to terrestrial conditions during emersion. Comparative analyses of the adaptive linkage ...

Warming and drought pose a serious threat to tropical forest. Yet the extent of this threat is uncertain, given the lack of methods to evaluate the forest tree cover changes under future climate predicted by complex dynamic vegetation models. Here we develop an empirical approach based on the observed climate space of tropical trees to estimate the maximum potential tropical tree cover (MPTC) i...

Forest fires pose a threat more serious than illegal felling in developing countries and are a cause of major concern for environmental security. Fires in tropical forests, though not devastating on a large scale as compared to large and infrequent fires in boreal or Mediterranean systems, still cause loss to biodiversity and economic and monetary value. In India, human-induced forest fires inc...

This paper analyses, within the new growth theory framework and using panel cointegration techniques, the effect of agricultural international technological spillovers on total factor productivity growth for a sample of 47 countries during the period 1970-1992. The analysis shows that total factor productivity is strongly influenced by domestic as well as foreign public R&D spending in agricult...

Mechanisms of global warming impacts on regional tropical precipitation are examined in a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model (ECHAM4/OPYC3). The pattern of the regional tropical precipitation changes, once established, tends to persist, growing in magnitude as greenhouse gases increase. The sulfate aerosol induces regional tropical precipitation anomalies similar to the greenhou...

The area under investigation is the Bau gold mining district in the State of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. It has tropical climate with limited bedrock exposures and the other constraints imposed in the environment. Bau is a gold field with Carlin style gold deposits. Geological analyses coupled with remote sensing data were used to detect structure elements and hydrothermall...

Much of this series has covered the weather types experienced in the tropics. Following on from the introduction to tropical climates in Part 1 (Galvin, 2007), this penultimate part describes the major climates and their relationship to the plants and animals of the tropics, including humankind, that have settled in all tropical environments. A map of the climatic zones of the tropics appears a...

Discoveries in recent years have disclosed the importance of marine cyanobacteria in the context of primary production and global nitrogen cycling. It is hypothesized here that microbial mats in tropical coastal habitats harbour a rich diversity of previously uncharacterized cyanobacteria and that benthic marine nitrogen fixation in coastal zones is substantial. A polyphasic approach was used t...