Forest weeds were not considered to be a major management problem in Hawai'i until the latter quarter of the last century. Most previous biological control programs in the state were against agricultural pests. An interagency committee (U.S.D.A. Forest Service, National Park Service, Hawai'i Department of Agriculture, Hawai'i Division of Forestry and Wildlife, and the University of Hawai'i) was...

We tested the hypothesis that winter removal rates of fruits of wax myrtle, Myrica cerifera, are higher in colder winters. Over a 9-year period, we monitored M. cerifera fruit crops in 13 0.1-ha study plots in South Carolina, U.S.A. Peak ripeness occurred in November, whereas peak removal occurred in the coldest months, December and January. Mean time to fruit removal within study plots was pos...

Lanza, O. Forni, N. Mangold, M. Nachon, S. M. Clegg, A. Yen, S. Maurice, R. C. Wiens, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field CA USA, Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Seattle WA USA, Chevron Energy Technology Company, Houston TX USA,Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM USA, Univ. Toulouse & CNRS, IRAP, Toulouse, France, Univ. Nantes & CNRS, Nantes, France, JPL Pasadena CA USA

The buyer solicits bids from suppliers with di®erent cost distributions de ̄ned by their capacities. The expected market share of each supplier is the ratio of its capacity to the industry capacity. The buyer's optimal reserve price declines with increases in the concentration of the industry. The lower reserve price can partially or fully o®set the price e®ects of a merger. However, a merger st...

Truthful revelation of preferences has emerged as a desideratum in the design of school choice programs. Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance mechanism is strategy-proof for students but limits their ability to communicate their preference intensities. This results in ex-ante inefficiency when ties at school preferences are broken randomly. We propose a variant of deferred acceptance mechanism wh...

Minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by Hafalir et al. [20] in the context of school choice. We study in the laboratory the effect of minority reserves on the outcomes of two prominent matching mechanisms, the Gale-Shapley and the Top Trading Cycles mechanisms. Our first experimental result is that the introduction of minority reserves enhances truth-telling of some minor...

Tropical ecosystems play a key role in many aspects of Earth system dynamics currently of global concern, including carbon sequestration and biodiversity. To accurately understand complex tropical systems it is necessary to parameterise key ecological aspects, such as rates of change (RoC), species turnover, dynamism, resilience, or stability. To obtain a long-term (>50 years) perspective on th...

The two-spotted leafhopper, Sophonia rufofascia (Kuoh and Kuoh), is an exotic pest from South-East Asia that attacks a wide variety of plant species in Hawaii. Myrica faya Aiton is an aggressive exotic weed that displaces and excludes native plants in Hawaiian forests. It has been argued that because of the high nutritional quality of its foliage, M. faya might facilitate leafhopper invasion of...

bayberry treatment of cholera described in ancient Chinese medicine. We found that an extract derived from a simple and rapid extraction of bayberry fruits could repress V. cholerae virulence gene expression at low concentrations and inhibit V. cholerae growth at high concentrations. Intriguingly, this bayberry extract did not inhibit or kill many non-pathogenic bacteria tested, including Esche...