Variation in numbers of land plant species on islands in the Galapagos Archipelago can be predicted on the basis of elevation, area of the adjacent island, distance from the nearest island, and distance from the center of the archipelago, but not on the basis of the area of the host island. Multiple linear regression (y = bx(1) + bx(2) . . .) gives better "goodness of fit" than curvilinear anal...

Recent theory suggests that the geographic location of island radiations (local accumulation of species diversity due to cladogenesis) can be predicted based on island area and isolation. Crickets are a suitable group for testing these predictions, as they show both the ability to reach some of the most isolated islands in the world, and to speciate at small spatial scales. Despite substantial ...

The instability of strained films for island formation is examined through an approach incorporating both discrete microscopic details and continuum mechanics. A linear relationship between the island wave number and misfit strain is found for large strains, while only in the small strain limit is a crossover to the continuum elasticity result obtained. A universal scaling relation accommodatin...

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are quite diverse in terms of various development metrics, but are uniformly vulnerable both to macroeconomic shocks and to changes in the biodiversity that supports fisheries and tourism. This special section assembles a set of papers that analyze international demand for the natural resources associated with the two sectors, and the factors that lie behin...

We discuss the consistency protocol in the island-based file system [6], a cluster file system designed to provide highly available and scalable data storage to Internet applications. The goal of availability is to maximize the percentage of client requests that succeed despite the failure of one or more islands, the building blocks of the file system. A small portion of the directory system is...

In investigating ways to reduce community vulnerability to environmental hazards it is essential to recognize the interaction between indigenous and scientific knowledge bases. Indigenous and scientific knowledge bases are dynamic entities. Using a Process Framework to identify how indigenous and scientific knowledge bases may be integrated, three communities impacted upon by environmental haza...

Birds are prolific colonists of islands, where they readily evolve distinct forms. Identifying predictable, directional patterns of evolutionary change in island birds, however, has proved challenging. The "island rule" predicts that island species evolve toward intermediate sizes, but its general applicability to birds is questionable. However, convergent evolution has clearly occurred in the ...

Background: Orthology is one of the cornerstones of gene function prediction. Dividing the phylogenetic relations between genes into either orthologs or paralogs is however an oversimplification. Already in two-species gene-phylogenies, the complicated, non-transitive nature of phylogenetic relations results in inparalogs and outparalogs. For situations with more than two species we lack semant...

Educational reform is a dynamic process that continues to haunt small island developments. After the two bold steps taken recently in Mauritius, namely regionalisation and the abolition of ranking at CPE level, there now seems to be a pause except for continued construction of schools. Whilst these developments seemed to be initially welcomed by the population in general, it has raised a number...