Daily rainfall over Northern Australia: Deviations from the world pattern

1988 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 463-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. J. Jackson
Author(s):  
S.J. Peacock

Melioidosis is a serious infection caused by the soil-dwelling Gram-negative bacillus Burkholderia pseudomallei. It is most commonly reported in north-east Thailand and northern Australia, but is increasingly recognized around the world. Infection is predominantly acquired through bacterial inoculation, often related to occupation, and mostly affects adults between the fourth and sixth decade who have risk factors such as diabetes mellitus and renal impairment....


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 2090
Author(s):  
Boyden ◽  
Wurm ◽  
Joyce ◽  
Boggs

African para grass (Urochloa mutica) is an invasive weed that has become prevalent across many important freshwater wetlands of the world. In northern Australia, including the World Heritage landscape of Kakadu National Park (KNP), its dense cover can displace ecologically, genetically and culturally significant species, such as the Australian native rice (Oryza spp.). In regions under management for biodiversity conservation para grass is often beyond eradication. However, its targeted control is also necessary to manage and preserve site-specific wetland values. This requires an understanding of para grass spread-patterns and its potential impacts on valuable native vegetation. We apply a multi-scale approach to examine the spatial dynamics and impact of para grass cover across a 181 km2 floodplain of KNP. First, we measure the overall displacement of different native vegetation communities across the floodplain from 1986 to 2006. Using high spatial resolution satellite imagery in conjunction with historical aerial-photo mapping, we then measure finer-scale, inter-annual, changes between successive dry seasons from 1990 to 2010 (for a 48 km2 focus area); Para grass presence-absence maps from satellite imagery (2002 to 2010) were produced with an object-based machine-learning approach (stochastic gradient boosting). Changes, over time, in mapped para grass areas were then related to maps of depth-habitat and inter-annual fire histories. Para grass invasion and establishment patterns varied greatly in time and space. Wild rice communities were the most frequently invaded, but the establishment and persistence of para grass fluctuated greatly between years, even within previously invaded communities. However, these different patterns were also shown to vary with different depth-habitat and recent fire history. These dynamics have not been previously documented and this understanding presents opportunities for intensive para grass management in areas of high conservation value, such as those occupied by wild rice.


Author(s):  
Anita Lundberg ◽  
Katarzyna Ancuta ◽  
Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska

The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty – tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen; into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest biodiversity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these ‘vampiric’ capitalist forces – which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics – is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory.As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the American Deep South.


This handbook offers an extensive cross-linguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence of polysynthesis remains under discussion, right down to whether it delineates a distinct, coherent type, rather than an assortment of frequently co-occurring traits. Chapters in the first part of the handbook relate polysynthesis to other issues central to linguistics, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and to typological features such as argument structure and head marking. Part II contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia. The third part examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolence, while Part IV looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages. Finally, Part V contains detailed grammatical descriptions of over twenty languages which have been characterized as polysynthetic, with special attention given to the presence or absence of potentially criterial features.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Maroske

Despite the expectation in nineteenth-century botany that the plants of one country were most similar to those of adjacent countries, by the middle of the century it was accepted that there was a connexion between flora of northern Australia and ?India'. The pattern and reasons for plant distribution around the world were studied in the emerging science of phytogeography, but this paper suggests that the strength of the Indo-Australian connexion was influenced by species limits in the established science of phytography or descriptive botany. This paper also shows that while the botany of Australia and ?India' was predominantly studied in European nations, Ferdinand Mueller used resources obtained from Joseph Hooker in Great Britain, and Friedrich Miquel in the Netherlands to add new details to the distribution pattern of ?Indian' plants in northern Australia. Although Mueller was unwilling to reflect on these findings himself, they seemed to challenge attempts to introduce evolutionary and geological explanations into phytogeography.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Petrucci ◽  
Enric Aguilar ◽  
Angela A. Pasqua ◽  
Sergio Vicente-Serrano ◽  
Fabio Zimbo ◽  
...  

<p>The most frequent and widespread landslides all over the world are induced by prolonged or heavy rainfall events. These phenomena often cause casualties and damages. Recent research on climate change has evidencing the link between the rainfall tendencies and the increase of damaging geohydrological events. This study has been carried out in the ambit of the EC Project INDECIS, whose aim is to develop an integrated approach to produce a series of climate indicators aimed at the high priority sectors of the Global Framework for Climate Services of the World Meteorological Organization (agriculture, risk reduction, energy, health, water), with the addition of tourism. The study area is Calabria, a region of Southern Italy frequently affected by mass movements and characterized by a highly variable climate. In this study, landslide occurrences in the period 1990-2018 have been collected for the whole territory of Calabria, and clustered according to the five provinces of the region. Moreover, 13 rainfall-based climatic indexes, among those proposed in the INDECIS project, have been calculated for each of the 79 rain gauges presenting complete and homogeneous databases. For each province and for the whole Calabria, the average and the maximum values of the climatic indices have been compared with the landslide occurrences in each year. The comparisons showed the best agreements with the following climatic indices: a) the total annual precipitation (RTA), the annual count of days when daily precipitation amount ≥ 10mm (R10mm), the annual count of days when daily precipitation amount ≥ 20mm (R20mm), the annual total precipitation when daily rainfall is greater than 95<sup>th</sup>-percentile (R95TOT) and, secondarily, the annual count of days with daily rainfall >= 50 mm (D50mm). For the best matches, the curves interpolating the two databases have been also drawn. The obtained results can be useful to predict the impacts that tendencies of rainfall indices patterns can have on slope stabilities of the territory.</p><p>Acknowledgments:</p><p>The Project INDECIS is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (SE), DLR (DE), BMWFW (AT), IFD (DK), MINECO (ES), ANR (FR) with co-funding by the European Union (Grant 690462)</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 123 (11) ◽  
pp. 1285-1287 ◽  
Author(s):  
V Shenoy ◽  
M P Kamath ◽  
M C Hegde ◽  
T D'Souza ◽  
S S Mammen

AbstractIntroduction:Melioidosis is an infectious disease caused by a saprophytic bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei. It is endemic to Southeast Asia and Northern Australia. It may manifest as a pulmonary lesion, osteomyelitis, abscesses in soft tissue and various organs, or as septicaemia.Case report:We report a case of a 40-year-old, diabetic man who presented with a neck lump resulting from super-infection of a tuberculosis cavity with B pseudomallei. The patient was successfully managed by drainage along with meticulous excision of the capsule and prolonged antibiotic and anti-tubercular treatment.Discussion:Melioidosis may be confused diagnostically with tuberculosis, as both diseases are endemic in the same regions. Our patient was unfortunate to suffer from both endemic diseases simultaneously, perhaps representing the first such case in the world literature.Conclusion:Increased awareness of melioidosis is important as, although the organism is easy to culture, it may be dismissed as a contaminant.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (17) ◽  
pp. 6127-6135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier P. Prat ◽  
Brian R. Nelson

Abstract The authors evaluate the contribution of tropical cyclones (TCs) to daily precipitation extremes over land for TC-active regions around the world. From 1998 to 2012, data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA 3B42) showed that TCs account for an average of 3.5% ± 1% of the total number of rainy days over land areas experiencing cyclonic activity regardless of the basin considered. TC days represent between 13% and 31% of daily extremes above 4 in. day−1, but can account locally for the large majority (>70%) or almost all (≈100%) of extreme rainfall even over higher-latitude areas marginally affected by cyclonic activity. Moreover, regardless of the TC basin, TC-related extremes occur preferably later in the TC season after the peak of cyclonic activity.


Author(s):  
Michael Fortescue ◽  
Marianne Mithun ◽  
Nicholas Evans

The first chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis introduces the notion of polysynthesis and the related issues that the volume addresses, such as complexity, the definition of the word, the nature of the lexicon, idiomaticity, and typological features such as argument structure and head marking. It also outlines the part structure of the volume: Part I addresses polysynthesis from different perspectives; Part II contains areal studies of those geographical regions of the world where polysynthesis is particularly common, such as the Arctic and Sub-Arctic and northern Australia; Part III examines diachronic topics such as language contact and language obsolescence; Part IV looks at acquisition issues in different polysynthetic languages.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maïa Ponsonnet

This article examines the status and functions of body-part words with respect to linguistic descriptions of emotions in Dalabon (Northern Australia). As in many languages in the world, words denoting invisible (internal) body-parts occur in figurative expressions. These expressions instantiate metaphors and metonymies inspired by non-observable somatic responses to emotions. In addition to this figurative pattern of usage, many more words for visible body-parts occur in expressions where they serve to produce more detailed descriptions of emotional behaviors — specifying which body-part is involved in a given emotional manifestation. The relatively widespread use of body-part words in such descriptions of emotions fosters semantic extensions, where some body-part nouns gain emotional connotations. The article analyzes these descriptive functions of body-part nouns in Dalabon, and examines how they reinforce semantic associations between body-parts and emotions.


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