Detecting range shifts among Australian fishes in response to climate change

One of the most obvious and expected impacts of climate change is a shift in the distributional range of organisms, which could have considerable ecological and economic consequences. Australian waters are hotspots for climate-induced environmental changes; here, we review these potential changes and their apparent and potential implications for freshwater, estuarine and marine fish. Our meta-analysis detected 300 papers globally on 'fish' and 'range shifts', with ∼7% being from Australia. Of the Australian papers, only one study exhibited definitive evidence of climate-induced range shifts, with most studies focussing instead on future predictions. There was little consensus in the literature regarding the definition of 'range', largely because of populations having distributions that fluctuate regularly. For example, many marine populations have broad dispersal of offspring (causing vagrancy). Similarly, in freshwater and estuarine systems, regular environmental changes (e.g. seasonal, ENSO cycles not related to climate change) cause expansion and contraction of populations, which confounds efforts to detect range 'shifts'. We found that increases in water temperature, reduced freshwater flows and changes in ocean currents are likely to be the key drivers of climate-induced range shifts in Australian fishes. Although large-scale frequent and rigorous direct surveys of fishes across their entire distributional ranges, especially at range edges, will be essential to detect range shifts of fishes in response to climate change, we suggest careful co-opting of fisheries, museum and other regional databases as a potential, but imperfect alternative. © 2011 CSIRO Open Access.

Compilation of Thunnus thynnus (bluefin tuna) catches in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean 1950-2010

The data have been extracted and compiled from various sources but mainly from the ICES data base. The ICES data are from catch databases downloaded from the ICES website on 2014-01-14. These data are resolved by ICES area, country and year. During inspection of these data, it was noted that Norwegian data for years before 1950 had not been entered into the catch database on the ICES website. ICES has been notified of this omission by B. R. MacKenzie. The Norwegian data from ICES Bulletins. Statistiques has been added. Additional historical bluefin tuna catch data from other fishery reports and sources have been included in the data file for years preceding those when countries started reported their landings officially to ICES. These additional data have been reported in the literature previously (MacKenzie and Myers 2007, Fisheries Research).

Compilation of Thunnus thynnus (bluefin tuna) catche in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean 1906-1949

The data have been extracted and compiled from various sources but mainly from the ICES data base. The ICES data are from catch databases downloaded from the ICES website on 2014-01-14. These data are resolved by ICES area, country and year. During inspection of these data, it was noted that Norwegian data for years before 1950 had not been entered into the catch database on the ICES website. ICES has been notified of this omission by B. R. MacKenzie. The Norwegian data from ICES Bulletins. Statistiques has been added. Additional historical bluefin tuna catch data from other fishery reports and sources have been included in the data file for years preceding those when countries started reported their landings officially to ICES. These additional data have been reported in the literature previously (MacKenzie and Myers 2007, Fisheries Research).

Towards an interactive architecture for web-based databases

World Wide Web has brought us a lot of challenges, such as infinite contents, resource diversity, and maintenance and update of contents. Web-based database (WBDB) is one of the answers to these challenges. Currently the most commonly used WBDB architecture is three-tier architecture, which is still somehow lack of flexibility to adapt to frequently changed user requirements. In this paper, we propose a hybrid interactive architecture for WBDB based on the reactive system concepts. In this architecture, we use sensors to catch users frequently changed requirements and use a decision making manager agent to process them and generate SQL commands dynamically. Hence the efficiency and flexibility are gained from this architecture, and the performance of WBDB is enhanced accordingly.

International review of environmental assessment tools and databases

Existing widely known environmental assessment models, primarily those for Life Cycle Assessment of manufactured products and buildings, were reviewed to grasp their characteristics, since the past several years have seen a significant increase in interest and research activity in the development of building environmental assessment methods. Each method or tool was assessed under the headings of description, data requirement, end-use, assessment criteria (scale of assessment and scoring/ weighting system)and present status