Detecting coherent signals of climate change is best achieved by conducting expansive, long-term studies. Here, using counts of waders (Charadrii) collected from ca. 3500 sites over 30 years and covering a major portion of western Europe, we present the largestscale study to show that faunal abundance is influenced by climate in winter. We demonstrate that the 'weighted centroids' of populations of seven species of wader occurring in internationally important numbers have undergone substantial shifts of up to 115 km, generally in a northeasterly direction. To our knowledge, this shift is greater than that recorded in any other study, but closer to what would be expected as a result of the spatial distribution of ecological zones. We establish that year-to-year changes in site abundance have been positively correlated with concurrent changes in temperature, but that this relationship is most marked towards the colder extremities of the birds' range, suggesting that shifts have occurred as a result of range expansion and that responses to climate change are temperature dependent. Many attempts to model the future impacts of climate change on the distribution of organisms, assume uniform responses or shifts throughout a species' range or with temperature, but our results suggest that this may not be a valid approach. We propose that, with warming temperatures, hitherto unsuitable sites in northeastern Europe will host increasingly important wader numbers, but that this may not be matched by declines elsewhere within the study area. The need to establish that such changes are occurring is accentuated by the statutory importance of this taxon in the designation of protected areas.

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Despite a long history of continuously improved magnetic properties, the further development of grain-oriented electrical steel is still an exciting field for industrial and joint fundamental research. Today, the driving forces for research and development (R&D) are on one hand increasing quality demands, i.e, still lower losses for more energy-efficient transformers and less transformer noise, and on the other hand the pressure to reduce manufacturing costs in order to stay competitive on the market. Evidently in the last years, the latter aspect has become the mainspring for most of the industrial R&D activities. Now nearly all producers are aiming at more compact and less expensive production routes. From the new techniques under development, most advanced in commercial realization is the application of low slab reheating temperatures in the range 1150...1300°C instead of up to 1400°C in the classical processes. A radical new method is thin slab casting and direct hot rolling used for steels with a system of inherent plus acquired inhibitors, the latter formed by nitriding the cold rolled strip. This method is very promising and far advanced in industrial tests. Another way for process shortening is to cast directly the hot strip from the steel melt by a twin-roll method. In pilot line tests, good cold workability and good magnetic properties have been achieved by optimising chemical composition, casting conditions, and subsequent thermo-mechanical treatments and by working with inherent plus acquired inhibitors. Another theoretical potential for cost and time saving is to replace box annealing for secondary recrystallization by short-time continuous annealing. Such processes are under development, partly using special in-line procedures to realize fast inhibitor creation after primary recrystallization, but are today still far away from commercial realization.1.3%Si steel hot bands were produced by hot rolling in a Steckel mill with two entrance temperatures: 1000°C (y rolling) and 910°C (u+y rolling). Hot band samples were processed with and without hot band annealing (900°C for 30s), cold rolled to final thickness of 0.5mm and annealed in H 2-25%N2 at 900°C for 40s. The combination of high hot rolling temperature and hot band annealing resulted in lower core loss and higher permeability. Although no significant differences were observed on the hot band microstructures, after hot band annealing the y rolled sample showed a larger grain size. The final results were attributed to the effect of the initial grain size prior to cold rolling on microstructure and texture after annealing.