The great Pacific groups of atolls are such archipelagoes as the Tuamotus, Carolines, Marshalls, Gilberts, the Phoenix-Ellice group, and those scattered clusters and individual islands collectively termed the Pacific Equatorial or Line Islands. The observations forming the basis of this paper were made on visits to all these groups, except the Phoenix-Ellice and Gilberts, as well as to the Aust...

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author. Data processing errors have resulted in misleading conclusions. The scientific community in King Saud University has serious concerns regarding the results and the article will be res...

Large-scale regular vegetation patterns are common in nature, but their causes are disputed. Whereas recent theory focuses on scale-dependent feedbacks as a potentially universal mechanism, earlier studies suggest that many regular spatial patterns result from territorial interference competition between colonies of social-insect ecosystem engineers, leading to hexagonally overdispersed nest si...

Soil profiles were sampled at 43 sites on granitic parent material at altitudes ranging from 970 to 1300 m in the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland. Many soils under undisturbed vegetation showed evidence of iron and organic matter translocation with distinctive Bh or Bs horizons. Approximately 50% of the sites sampled had no or partial vegetation cover, due either to human Ž . activity trampling o...

Most research on vegetation in mountain ranges focuses on elevation gradients as climate gradients, but elevation gradients are also the result of geological processes that build and deconstruct mountains. Recent findings from the Luquillo Mountains, Puerto Rico, have raised questions about whether erosion rates that vary due to past tectonic events and are spatially patterned in relation to el...

Frost boils in northern Alaska vary from large, 2–3-m diameter, barren non-sorted circles to completely vegetated hummocks. Summer warmth increases southwards from the coast. Average thaw-layer thickness shows the opposite trend. Frost heave shows no trend along the climate gradient but is affected by soil texture. Heave is greatest on frost boils with fine-grained sediments. Biomass increases ...

An analytical model for the read back signal is derived for perpendicular and longitudinal magnetic recording. The model captures the contribution of a single bit rather than the contribution of a bit transition which makes it applicable to patterned media as well as continuous media. It is based on the law of Biot–Savart and separates the contribution of the magnetic media from the head sensit...

The choice of sampling methods is a crucial step in every field survey in herpetology. In countries where time and financial support are limited, the choice of the methods is critical. The methods used to sample snakes often lack objective criteria, and the traditional methods have apparently been more important when making the choice. Consequently researches using not-standardized methods are ...