Cold-water coral ecosystems figure the formation of large seabed structures such as reefs and giant carbonate mounds; they represent unexplored paleo-environmental archives of earth history. Like their tropical cousins, cold-water coral ecosystems harbour rich species diversity. For this volume, key institutions in cold-water coral research have contributed 62 state-of-the-art articles on topics from geology and oceanography to biology and conservation, with some impressive underwater images.

This volume brings forth a set of selected papers from the Conference on Modeling Land Sattle Systems for Military Planning. Sponsored by the Special Programme Panel on Systems Science of the NATO Science Committee, the conference took place in Ottobrunn, Germany, at the War Gaming Centre of Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft. The idea to organize a conference on land battle systemmodelswas first suggested to me in 1g72 by Andreas Mortensen, then a member of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and presently at the SHAPE Technical Centre, when we discussed the apparent inconsistencies of various evaluations of force capability within NATO. Frequently, decision makers are confronted by contradictory results of different studies addressing essentially the same problern leaving them with the impression that the tools of systems analysis and operations research may not be very objective guides. However, experienced systems researchers know that a detailed comparison of models, their assumptions and inputs, would generally show that results are not really contradictory. But not only seem the decision processes in large national and international organizations tobe suchthat a comparison can hardly ever be accomplished, also the docu mentation available is rarely sufficient to really camprehend the differences in results. For these reasons, we felt that an effort to review the state of the art of model ing in support of force capabil ity assessments was overdue.

Of huge relevance in a number of fields, this is a survey of the different processes of soil clay mineral formation and the consequences of these processes concerning the soil ecosystem, especially plant and mineral. Two independent systems form soil materials. The first is the interaction of rocks and water, unstable minerals adjusting to surface conditions. The second is the interaction of the biosphere with clays in the upper parts of alteration profiles.

Devastating losses caused by diseases such as smallpox led to an epidemic of bereavement among the Natives. This loss resonated with the French, who had dealt with smaller epidemics in France and were also mourning their absent communities through a nostalgia for home. Blum traces how ghosts provided transgenerational and transcultural links that guided understanding rather than encouraging violence. Ghost Brothers insightfully examines the process of this colonial interdependent alliance between Native and European worlds.