Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences was first conceived, published, and disseminated by the Center for Information and Numerical Data Analysis and Synthesis (CINDAS) * at Purdue University in 1 957, starting its coverage of theses with the academic year 1955. Beginning with Volume 13, the printing and dissemination phases of the activity were transferred to University Microfilms/Xerox of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the thought that such an arrangement would be more beneficial to the academic and general scientific and technical community. After five years of this joint undertaking we had concluded that it was in the interest of all con cerned if the printing and distribution of the volumes were handled by an interna tional publishing house to assure improved service and broader dissemination. Hence, starting with Volume 18, Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences has been disseminated on a worldwide basis by Plenum Publishing Cor poration of New York, and in the same year the coverage was broadened to include Canadian universities. All back issues can also be ordered from Plenum. We have reported in Volume 28 (thesis year 1 983) a total of 10,661 theses titles from 26 Canadian and 197 United States universities. We are sure that this broader base for these titles reported will greatly enhance the value of this important annual reference work. While Volume 28 reports theses submitted in-1983, on occasion, certain univer sities do report theses submitted in previous years but not reported at the time.

The Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) project is a large long-term metastudy established to assess the effectiveness and ecological impacts of burning and fire "surrogates" such as cuttings and mechanical fuel treatments that are used instead of fire, or in combination with fire, to restore dry forests. One of the 13 national FFS sites is the Northeastern Cascades site at Mission Creek on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The study area includes 12 forested stands that encompass a representative range of dry forest conditions in the northeastern Cascade Range. We describe site histories and environmental settings, experimental design, field methods, and quantify the pretreatment composition and structure of vegetation, fuels, soils and soil biota, entomology and pathology, birds, and small mammals that occurred during the 2000 and 2001 field seasons. We also describe the implementation of thinning treatments completed during 2003 and spring burning treatments done during 2004 and 2006.