In China, agricultural residues (particularly from rice) are widely used for energy and other applications, albeit on a localized scale and often at poor rates of efficiency. if some portion of this biomass were to be reallocated and transported to central biomass energy facilities, an initial component of the design process would be to gain an understanding of the spatial distribution of biomass production.

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Environmentally distributed ecological networks (EDENs) are growing increasingly important in ecology, coordinating research in more disciplines and over larger areas than ever before, while supplanting post hoc syntheses of uncoordinated research. With the rise of multiple broadly focused, continental-scale EDENs, these networks will be directing an increasingly large proportion of resources in ecology, which warrants a review of their use.

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The proportional cover of forest and grassland vegetation, known as landscape openness, has been particularly difficult to reconstruct because of differences in pollen productivity and transport between the two vegetation types. To begin to calibrate landscape openness in eastern North America, we collected 2 1 samples of surface sediments front small ponds (less than 60 ha) in the Upper Connecticut River Valley of New England, USA.

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