Vegetation gap patterns in arid grasslands, such as the "fairy circles" of Namibia, are one of nature's greatest mysteries and subject to a lively debate on their origin. They are characterized by small-scale hexagonal ordering of circular bare-soil gaps that persists uniformly in the landscape scale to form a homogeneous distribution. Pattern-formation theory predicts that such highly ordered gap patterns should be found also in other water-limited systems across the globe, even if the mechanisms of their formation are different. Here we report that so far unknown fairy circles with the same spatial structure exist 10,000 km away from Namibia in the remote outback of Australia. Combining fieldwork, remote sensing, spatial pattern analysis, and process-based mathematical modeling, we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by self-organization, with no correlation with termite activity; the driving mechanism is a positive biomasswater feedback associated with water runoff and biomass-dependent infiltration rates. The remarkable match between the patterns of Australian and Namibian fairy circles and model results indicate that both patterns emerge from a nonuniform stationary instability, supporting a central universality principle of pattern-formation theory. Applied to the context of dryland vegetation, this principle predicts that different systems that go through the same instability type will show similar vegetation patterns even if the feedback mechanisms and resulting soil-water distributions are different, as we indeed found by comparing the Australian and the Namibian fairy-circle ecosystems. These results suggest that biomass-water feedbacks and resultant vegetation gap patterns are likely more common in remote drylands than is currently known.drylands | spatial pattern | Triodia grass | Turing instability | vegetation gap P attern-formation theory (1) and the influence of Alan Turing's work on understanding biological morphogenesis (2) are increasingly recognized in environmental sciences (3). Vegetation patterns resulting from self-organization occur frequently in waterlimited ecosystems and, similar to Turing patterns, show pattern morphologies that change from gaps to stripes (labyrinths) to spots with decreasing plant-available moisture (4-6). The patterns may emerge on completely flat and homogeneous substrate and are induced by positive feedbacks between local vegetation growth and water transport toward the growth location.

The first Australian record of the western flower thrips, Frankliniella occidentalis is reported from the Perth area in Western Australia. It is a notorious vector of tomato spotted wilt virus causing severe economic losses in seed crops, ornamentals, vegetables and other crops particularly in western North America. ~ ~ ~~ ~~The western flower thrips, Frankliniella occidentalis (Pergande), occurs in Canada, Mexico, USA including Hawaii,

This paper tables and reports on pooled taxonomic data from three separate research projects involving aspects of eucalypt invertebrate ecology: canopy invertebrates in jarrah and marri forest; bark invertebrates on four eucalypt species in forest and woodland; and soil and litter fauna in jarrah and marri forest. The data support the concept of a high invertebrate biodiversity on and under southwestern eucalypts, with 1 234 adult morphospecies of invertebrates being collected from the bark alone. Despite different trapping methods used in each of the three studies, we were able to find a high degree of overlap at the family level between bark and canopy fauna (126 families were found on both bark and in the canopy representing 79.2% of 159 canopy families). Eighty identified genera were also found on both bark and canopy, which represents 46.2% of the 173 identified canopy genera. The soil and litter fauna data are not complete (a taxonomic inventory of Acarina and Formicidae is not available) but appears to be more distinctive, sharing only 24 families (= 60% of the 40 identified soil-litter families) with bark, and 17 families (= 42.5% of the soillitter families) with the canopy. At the generic level, only seven identified genera (= 8.6% of 22 soil-litter genera) were shared between soil-litter and bark, and five genera (= 6.2% of soil-litter genera) were shared between soil-litter and the canopy.An examination of the trophic guilds reveals that fungivores-decomposers were very diverse in soil and litter (accounting for approximately 50% of the biodiversity in these substrates). This guild was much less diverse on the canopy (21.6% of the canopy diversity) and the bark (16.9% of bark diversity). Sap-sucking organisms were mc~e diverse in soil (13.9%) and litter (12.8%) than on the canopy (5.3%) or on bark (5.9%). The canopy result is surprising, and suggests that not many invertebrate species are able to feed on the sap of southwestern eucalypts, the sap 0' which may contain a high proportion of toxic compounds. Predators were more diverse on the canopy and on bark (~19-23% of total taxa) than in soil and litter (~ 9-9.5%), as were parasitoids (18.7% and 22.5% compared with 105% and 14.8%). Epiphyte grazers and phytophages were not very diverse ($11 %) on any of the substrates, and representatives of other guilds or organisms whose diet was unknown accounted for less than 2.5% of the total diversity. Tourist species were not recognised among the soil and litter fauna, though they were found in the canopy and on bark, and ants were not quantified for soil and litter.