Star formation towards the Scutum tangent region and the effects of
  Galactic environment
  By positional matching to the catalogue of Galactic Ring Survey molecular
clouds, we have derived distances to 793 Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS)
sources out of a possible 806 located within the region defined by Galactic
longitudes l = 28.5 degr to 31.5 degr and latitudes |b| < 1 degr. This section
of the Galactic Plane contains several major features of Galactic structure at
different distances, mainly mid-arm sections of the Perseus and Sagittarius
spiral arms and the tangent of the Scutum-Centarus arm, which is coincident
with the end of the Galactic Long Bar. By utilising the catalogued cloud
distances plus new kinematic distance determinations, we are able to separate
the dense BGPS clumps into these three main line-of-sight components to look
for variations in star-formation properties that might be related to the
different Galactic environments. We find no evidence of any difference in
either the clump mass function or the average clump formation efficiency (CFE)
between these components that might be attributed to environmental effects on
scales comparable to Galactic-structure features.
  Despite having a very high star-formation rate, and containing at least one
cloud with a very high CFE, the star formation associated with the
Scutum-Centarus tangent does not appear to be in any way abnormal or different
to that in the other two spiral-arm sections. Large variations in the CFE are
found on the scale of individual clouds, however, which may be due to local
triggering agents as opposed to the large-scale Galactic structure.
