Houses near Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

Holiday houses, Judge House, Camp Island

As seen from hill behind.

Birds in an Australian rainforest: Their attraction for visitors and visitors' ecological impacts

Lamington National Park in Queensland, Australia is noted for its rainforest and is part of the World Heritage listed property but prior to this work, no systematic study has been done of the importance of birds to its visitors. This study is based on data from survey forms handed to visitors at an important site in the park and completed by visitors following their visit. It yielded 622 useable responses. These enabled us to establish the comparative importance of birds as an attraction to this site for this sample of visitors. Furthermore, logit regression is used to target analysis and to identify factors that increase the likelihood of a visitor saying that birds are an important attraction. In addition, the relative importance to visitors of various attributes of birds at this site is established. These attributes include hearing birds, diversity of birds, seeing lots of birds, presence of rare birds, presence of brightly coloured birds and physical contact with birds. Logit regression analysis is used to isolate independent variables that increase or decrease the likelihood that visitors find diversity of birds, brightly coloured birds or physical contact with birds at this site to be important. For example, factors such as the level of education of visitors, their gender, knowledge of birds and conservation attitudes and statistically significant influences. As a result of the analysis potential conflicts between different types of park visitors in relation to human interaction with birds are identified. Some potential ecological implications of human interactions with birds are modelled and discussed, and their economic conservation and biodiversity consequences are considered

Swapping space for time and unfair tests of ecological models

Testing ecological models for management is an increasingly important part of the maturation of ecology as an applied science. Consequently, we need to work at applying fair tests of models with adequate data. We demonstrate that a recent test of a discrete time, stochastic model was biased towards falsifying the predictions. If the model was a perfect description of reality, the test falsified the predictions 84% of the time. We introduce an alternative testing procedure for stochastic models, and show that it falsifies the predictions only 5% of the time when the model is a perfect description of reality. The example is used as a point of departure to discuss some of the philosophical aspects of model testing.

Ecological interface design for pasteurizer II: A process description of semantic mapping

Ecological interface design (EID) is proving to be a promising approach to the design of interfaces for complex dynamic systems. Although the principles of EID and examples of its effective use are widely available, few readily available examples exist of how the individual displays that constitute an ecological interface are developed. This paper presents the semantic mapping process within EID in the context of prior theoretical work in this area. The semantic mapping process that was used in developing an ecological interface for the Pasteurizer II microworld is outlined, and the results of an evaluation of the ecological interface against a more conventional interface are briefly presented. Subjective reports indicate features of the ecological interface that made it particularly valuable for participants. Finally, we outline the steps of an analytic process for using EID. The findings presented here can be applied in the design of ecological interfaces or of configural displays for dynamic processes.

Implications of current ecological thinking for biodiversity conservation: A review of the salient issues

Given escalating concern worldwide about the loss of biodiversity, and given biodiversity's centrality to quality of life, it is imperative that current ecological knowledge fully informs societal decision making. Over the past two decades, ecological science has undergone many significant shifts in emphasis and perspective, which have important implications for how we manage ecosystems and species. In particular, a shift has occurred from the equilibrium paradigm to one that recognizes the dynamic, non-equilibrium nature of ecosystems. Revised thinking about the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecological systems has important implications for management. Thus, it is of growing concern to ecologists and others that these recent developments have not been translated into information useful to managers and policy makers. Many conservation policies and plans are still based on equilibrium assumptions. A fundamental difficulty with integrating current ecological thinking into biodiversity policy and management planning is that field observations have yet to provide compelling evidence for many of the relationships suggested by non-equilibrium ecology. Yet despite this scientific uncertainty, management and policy decisions must still be made. This paper was motivated by the need for considered scientific debate on the significance of current ideas in theoretical ecology for biodiversity conservation. This paper aims to provide a platform for such discussion by presenting a critical synthesis of recent ecological literature that (1) identifies core issues in ecological theory, and (2) explores the implications of current ecological thinking for biodiversity conservation.