Special Antarctic Blend (SAB) is a diesel fuel dominated by aliphatic hydrocarbons that is commonly used in Antarctic and subantarctic regions. The past and present use of SAB fuel at Australia's scientific research stations has resulted in multiple spills, contaminating soils in these pristine areas. Despite this, no soil quality guidelines or remediation targets have been developed for the re...

To remotely monitor vegetation at temporal and spatial resolutions unobtainable with satellite-based systems, near remote sensing systems must be employed. To this extent we used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index NDVI sensors and normal digital cameras to monitor the greenness of six different but common and widespread High Arctic plant species/groups (graminoid/Salix polaris; Cassiope tet...

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope signals in plant tissues integrate plant-environment interactions over long periods. In this study, we hypothesized that humid alpine life conditions are narrowing the scope for significant deviations from common carbon, water and nitrogen relations as captured by stable isotope signals. We explored the variation in δ(13)C and δ(15)N in 32 plant species from t...

Due to the ease with which chromosomes can be observed, the Allium species, and onion in particular, have been familiar materials employed in cytogenetic experiments in biology. In this study, centromeric histone H3 (CENH3)-coding cDNAs were identified in four Allium species (onion, welsh onion, garlic and garlic chives) and cloned. Anti-CENH3 antibody was then raised against a deduced amino ac...

The monogeneric subfamily Novophytoptinae is a separate lineage of phytoptids restricted to endoparasitism on herbaceous monocots of the order Poales. Novophytoptines live under the epidermis of their hosts where they feed on parenchymatous cells and reproduce therein. It is unknown yet how novophytoptines penetrate the plant epidermis, but preliminary observations indicate that they might be a...

Continued fractions lie at the heart of a number of classical algorithms like Euclid's greatest common divisor algorithm or the lattice reduction algorithm of Gauss that constitutes a 2-dimensional generalization. This paper surveys the main properties of functional operators, |transfer operators| due to Ruelle and Mayer (also following L evy, Kuzmin, Wirsing, Hensley, and others) that describe...

This paper presents a second-order analysis for a simple model optimal control problem of a partial diierential equation, namely a well-posed semilinear elliptic system with constraints on the control variable only. The cost to be minimized is a standard quadratic functional. Assuming the feasible set to be polyhedric, we state necessary and suucient second order optimality conditions, includin...

The influences of a geographical location on floristic composition, horizontal structure, and biomass of the herb layer in pine and mixed pine forest communities along climatic and pollution gradients in East Germany, Poland, and Belarus were determined. Phytosociological records were collected in permanent plots in May 1995. Each record covered an area of 400 m2. The floristic composition of t...