Climatological research in the tropics of northern Australia has focused particularly on the Australian summer monsoon. However, the timing of many ecologically important processes is determined not by the monsoon but by extra‐monsoonal rainfall events. These events produce a temporal pattern of wet and dry spells that is at least as important ecologically as the amount of rain. We defined the rainy season as that period when...

Location, aims Long Island's biota was destroyed by volcanic eruption in c. 1645, and Motmot, an emergent island in its caldera lake, was re‐created in 1968, providing a nested pair of natural colonization sequences. In 1999 we surveyed the plants and vertebrates of Long and the entire biota of Motmot for comparison with previous surveys of Long (1932, 1972, birds only) and Motmot (1969–88). Results The known flora of Long is...