While phenological shifts and migration of isolated species under climate change have already been observed on alpine summits, very few studies have focused on community composition changes in subalpine grasslands. Here we use permanent plots monitored since 1954 and precisely located phytosociological censuses from 1970 to study compositional changes of subalpine grasslands in two distinct regions of the Swiss Northern Alps. In both areas, warming trends during the monitoring period were associated with changes in land management (abandonment of goat and sheep pasturing or grazing replaced by mowing). Old and recent inventories were compared with correspondence analyses (CA). Ecological indicator values, community-affinities and biological traits of the species were used to infer the factors responsible for triggering the observed changes. In both regions, subalpine grasslands were stable with smaller changes than have previously been observed in alpine environments. Only a few species appeared or disappeared and changes were generally limited to increasing or decreasing frequency and cover of certain taxa. At one site, grazing abandonment favored fallow species. Some of these species were located at their upper altitudinal distribution limits and may have spread because of rising temperatures. In both areas, declining species were predominantly alpine and low-growing species; their decline was probably due to increased competition (e.g., shadow) with more vigorous subalpine taxa no longer limited by grazing. We conclude that vegetation communities can respond rapidly to warming as long as colonization is facilitated by available space or structural change. In the subalpine grasslands studies, changes were mainly driven by land management. These communities have a dense vegetation cover and newly arriving herbaceous species preferring warmer conditions may take some time to establish themselves. However, climate disturbances, such as exceptional drought, may accelerate community changes by opening gaps for new species.

No abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the exclusive perpetual exploration of grid shaped networks using anonymous, oblivious and fully asynchronous robots. Our results hold for robots without sense of direction (i.e. they do not agree on a common North, nor do they agree on a common left and right ; furthermore, the "North" and "left" of each robot is decided by an adversary that schedules robots for execution, and may change between invocations of particular robots). We focus on the minimal number of robots that are necessary and sufficient to solve the problem in general grids. In more details, we prove that three deterministic robots are necessary and sufficient, provided that the size of the grid is n × m with 3 ≤ n ≤ m or n = 2 and m ≥ 4. Perhaps surprisingly, and unlike results for the exploration with stop problem (where grids are "easier" to explore and stop than rings with respect to the number of robots), exclusive perpetual exploration requires as many robots in the ring as in the grid. Furthermore, we propose a classification of configurations such that the space of configurations to be checked is drastically reduced. This pre-processing lays the bases for the automated verification of our algorithm for general grids as it permits to avoid combinatorial explosion.

No abstract

Due the multiplicity of loci of control, a main issue distributed systems have to cope with lies in the uncertainty on the system state created by the adversaries that are asynchrony, failures, dynamicity, mobility, etc. Considering message-passing systems, this paper considers the uncertainty created by the net effect of three of these adversaries, namely, asynchrony, failures, and anonymity. This means that, in addition to be asynchronous and crash-prone, the processes have no identity.Trivially, agreement problems (e.g., consensus) that cannot be solved in presence of asynchrony and failures cannot be solved either when adding anonymity. The paper consequently proposes anonymous failure detectors to circumvent these impossibilities. It has several contributions. First it presents three classes of failure detectors (denoted AP , AΩ and AΣ) and show that they are the anonymous counterparts of the classes of perfect failure detectors, eventual leader failure detectors and quorum failure detectors, respectively. The class AΣ is new and showing it is the anonymous counterpart of the class Σ is not trivial. Then, the paper presents and proves correct a genuinely anonymous consensus algorithm based on the pair of anonymous failure detector classes (AΩ, AΣ) ("genuinely" means that, not only processes have no identity, but no process is aware of the total number of processes). This new algorithm is not a "straightforward extension" of an algorithm designed for non-anonymous systems. To benefit from AΣ, it uses a novel message exchange pattern where each phase of every round is made up of sub-rounds in which appropriate control information is exchanged. Finally, the paper discusses the notions of failure detector class hierarchy and weakest failure detector class for a given problem in the context of anonymous systems.

No abstract

Due the multiplicity of loci of control, a main issue distributed systems have to cope with lies in the uncertainty on the system state created by the adversaries that are asynchrony, failures, dynamicity, mobility, etc. Considering message-passing systems, this paper considers the uncertainty created by the net effect of three of these adversaries, namely, asynchrony, failures, and anonymity. This means that, in addition to be asynchronous and crash-prone, the processes have no identity.Trivially, agreement problems (e.g., consensus) that cannot be solved in presence of asynchrony and failures cannot be solved either when adding anonymity. The paper consequently proposes anonymous failure detectors to circumvent these impossibilities. It has several contributions. First it presents three classes of failure detectors (denoted AP , AΩ and AΣ) and show that they are the anonymous counterparts of the classes of perfect failure detectors, eventual leader failure detectors and quorum failure detectors, respectively. The class AΣ is new and showing it is the anonymous counterpart of the class Σ is not trivial. Then, the paper presents and proves correct a genuinely anonymous consensus algorithm based on the pair of anonymous failure detector classes (AΩ, AΣ) ("genuinely" means that, not only processes have no identity, but no process is aware of the total number of processes). This new algorithm is not a "straightforward extension" of an algorithm designed for non-anonymous systems. To benefit from AΣ, it uses a novel message exchange pattern where each phase of every round is made up of sub-rounds in which appropriate control information is exchanged. Finally, the paper discusses the notions of failure detector class hierarchy and weakest failure detector class for a given problem in the context of anonymous systems.

No abstract