Book Chapters

The Mediterranean Basin is a meeting point of three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, and this is responsible for the great diversity of plants, animals and cultures that formed the cradle of Western civilization. It is considered one of the biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al. 2000) because of its high species richness and high proportion of endemisms (Thompson 2005). The total area showing a M

The hazardous mediterranean climate, highly flammable vegetation, and rugged terrain, all important elements of fire behavior, become problems only in the presence of people. People recreate and build homes in the mediterranean wildlands because of the delightful climate and will continue to do so as long as space is available. People start most fires, and their mere presence tends to warp fire su

Until relatively recently the importance of fire and the origin of fire-adaptive traits have received minimal attention from paleoecologists, and appreciation of this importance has varied across the different mediterranean-type climate (MTC) ecosystems. For example, Axelrod (1973) and Raven & Axelrod (1978) wrote extensive treatises on the origins of the California flora, and yet gave little or n

As illustrated in Fig. 2.1 there are four environmental parameters that are necessary to determine the distribution of fire-prone ecosystems. However, they are insufficient to predict ecosystem responses to fire without a detailed understanding of the fire regime (see Fig. 2.7). Different fire regimes have very different potentials for recovery and place very different premiums on specific plant t

A major benefit of riverbank filtration (RBF) is that it provides a relatively effective means for pathogen removal. There is a need to conduct more injection-and-recovery transport studies at operating RBF sites in order to properly assess the combined effects of the site heterogeneities and ambient physicochemical conditions, which are difficult to replicate in the lab. For field transport studi

This volume is the fifth in a series of reports by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on the assessment of the quantity and quality of the nation’s coal deposits that potentially could be mined during the next few decades. For eight years (1995-2003), geologic, geochemical, and resource information was collected and compiled for the five major coal-producing regions of the United States: the Appala

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The PEER NGA ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) were derived by five developer teams over several years, resulting in five sets of GMPEs. The teams used various subsets of a global database of ground motions and metadata from shallow earthquakes in tectonically active regions in the development of the equations. Since their publication, the predicted motions from these GMPEs have been comp

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