evaluations. Yellow Finn has a higher percentage of small tubers than Yukon Gold and thus different market targets. Consumer evaluations indicate a wide range in preferences among individual varieties as to taste, appearance and texture. However, no consensus of general preferences exists as to skin color or flesh color.

Although bats are one of the most successful and diverse of mammalian orders, studies that focus upon bat endoparasites are limited. To further knowledge of bat parasitology, pipistrelle bats (Pipistrellus pipistrellus and P. pygmaeus) were acquired from across the Greater Manchester and Lancashire region of England and examined for gastrointestinal helminths using morphological and molecular analyses. Sixty-eight of 90 adult/juvenile bats (76% prevalence) were infected with at least 1 species of helminth and mean helminth abundance was 48·2 (+/-7·0). All helminths were digenean trematodes and the following species were identified in 51 P. pipistrellus specimens (prevalence in parentheses): Lecithodendrium linstowi (80·4%), L. spathulatum (19·6%), Prosthodendrium sp. (35·3%), Plagiorchis koreanus (29·4%) and Pycnoporus heteroporus (9·8%). Statistical analyses, incorporating multifactorial models, showed that male bats exhibited a significantly more aggregated helminth distribution and lower abundance than females. Positive associations were observed between L. linstowi and L. spathulatum, Prosthodendrium sp. and P. heteroporus and between L. spathulatum and P. koreanus. A revised phylogeny of bat-associated Lecithodendriidae, incorporating novel L. spathulatum and Prosthodendrium sp. 28S rRNA sequences, separated the controversial clade formed by L. linstowi and P. hurkovaae. Further studies are likely to assist the understanding of bat-parasite/pathogen relationships, helminth infracommunity structures and phylogenetics.

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<p>Much of the Earth experiences regular drought, however, the processes occurring during the dry season remain unexplained, such as the "Birch Effect"—the pulse of respiration on rewetting a dry soil, or why, during the summer in California grasslands, microbial biomass increases. These changes result from a combination of microbial drought survival physiologies coupled to the physical dynamics of the soil system. Although many studies have emphasized microbial responses to drought and have looked to such mechanisms to explain the Birch Effect, it appears more likely that that the mobilization of bioavailable C is a result of physical/chemical forces that mobilize C upon rewetting. This talk will focus on how we bridge the scales from the micro- to the ecosystem: how can we incorporate the dry-soil and pulse processes into large-scale models of soil carbon processes? </p>