Postage stamps are true identity carriers - and therefore grist to cultural geographers' mill. Take for instance Dutch and German stamps over the past 150 years: they tell strikingly different stories about the countries' perceived national identities - and about the development of those identities.

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China has been the single largest developing economy to receive foreign direct investment (FDI) since the early 1990s. By the end of 2004, China had approved 508,941 cases with an accumulative FDI value of US$ 562 billion. It absorbed some 26 % of the total of US$ 233 billion of FDI received in 2004 by the developing economies. FDI has been a feature of the Chinese economy for more than 25 years during which both the institutional and contextual environment and corporate investment strategies have changed drastically. The influx of foreign assets to China has undergone fundamental structural changes in such areas as entry mode, industry selection, investment size, and location.

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Since its humble beginnings some four centuries ago, America's viticulture has evolved into one of the world's most significant wine producers. Although the West Coast, California in particular, currently receives most attention as the continent's primary producer of wine, the first vines actually appeared in the middle Rio Grande valley of New Mexico in the 1620s, a century prior to the establishment of California viticulture.

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Large regions of the steppe areas in southern and north-eastern Tibet are often regarded as natural vegetation types. The scattered occurrence of isolated stands of different Juniperus species, however, witnesses that the natural potential forested area is much larger. Palaeobotanical findings give evidence that the destruction of juniper forests might have already started during neolithic times. However, it is not clear if all isolated forests presently found in the vicinity of Buddhist monasteries are the remains of a formerly closed forest cover or if some of them have been replanted. Dendroecological investigations on such juniper forests show that the growth limiting climate factor is available moisture and that these juniper forests can be used to reconstruct rainfall variations during the past two millennia. Furthermore, the tree-ring chronologies can serve as dating tools for timber found in historic Tibetan buildings and can even help to locate the original growth region of the wood before it was transported to the construction place.

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In the detection of ancient or palaeo-El Niños an actualistic approach is utilized. The oceanic/atmospheric conditions that typify these phenomena and their environmental consequences in the present are assumed to have happened also in the past. Thus, traces of catastrophic natural events are scrutinized in geological and archaeological series. Since El Niño is a typical oceanic/climatologic anomaly of the eastern tropical Pacific and western South America, clues about its occurrence are sought in archaeological findings pre-dating the arrival of the Spaniards (1525/1531) and in geological series back into + 18,000 y B.P. Although in the origin of past El Niños are involved dust from volcanic eruptions and subsequent variations in solar radiance, this anomaly is not necessarily in tune with those found in the northern Hemisphere using geo-dating techniques. This is due to the maritime character of the temperature fluctuations of the southern Hemisphere and a dominating zonal circulation, which inhibits meridional exchanges of air masses and prevents drastic oceanic changes.

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The geomorphology of mountains is dependent on the geologic-tectonic structure, i.e. the energy of erosion which increases according to the vertical. The expression "extreme high mountains" has been established as the extreme of a continuous mountain classification. It has to be understood in terms of geomorphology, glaciology and vegetation. The correspondence of planetary and hypsometric change of forms is of great value as synthetic explanation. That is confirmed with regard to vegetation, periglacial geomorphology and glaciology. Due to the world-wide reconstruction of the snowline its paleoclimatic importance increases, too. Apart from lower limits the periglacial and glacial altitudinal levels also show zones of optimum development and climatic upper limits in the highest mountains of the earth. According to the proportion of the altitudinal levels a classification of arid, temperate and humid high mountains has been developed.

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