Analysis of young driver crash data. Report to the Research Council of Oman, Muscat

Road traffic crashes are an alarming public health issue in Oman, despite ongoing improvements in traffic law enforcement practices and technology. One of the main target groups for road safety in Oman are young drivers aged 17-25 years. This report provides an overview of the characteristics of crashes in Oman involving young drivers (17-25 years) between 1st January 2009 and 31st December 2011. Although, young drivers aged 17-25 years comprise around 17% of all licence holders in Oman, they represented more than one third of all drivers involved in road traffic crashes in the country. A total of 11,101 young drivers (17-25 years) were involved in registered crashes during the study period. From this, 7,727 young drivers (69.6%) were found to be the cause of the crashes...

Licensing system in Oman and literature review. Report to the Research Council of Oman, Muscat

This document reviews the existing literature in the area of novice driver behaviour and the impact of Graduated Driver Licencing (GDL) as a key response to young driver management. The document focuses on consolidating the available research evidence and identifying existing gaps in the current knowledge. The chapter reviews novice driver crash risk, the factors that influence novice driver behaviour, countermeasures used to address the problem, the learner phase, the provisional phase, The Australian example of GDL, compliance with the road laws and parental involvement in the GDL process...

Exploring Environmental Stewardship Through Data-Driven Practices

What potential do artists working with environmental data in public space have for producing new forms of engagement with local environmental conditions? Operating on the edge of heavy bureaucracy, these types of data-driven artistic experiments probe the politics of environmental metrics and explore methods of engaging audiences with issues of environmental health. This discussion considers a small collection of cases studies representative of this growing field of practice. These are works by Natalie Jeremijenko and The Living, Tega Brain and Keith Deverell. The case studies considered are examples of strategic design, works that soften, reveal and potentially shift existing regulations and bureaucratic norms. In doing so they open up new possibilities and questions as to what the smart city is and how it might be realised.

The National Stroke Nursing Council: A nursing call for action

Nursing is fundamental to the care of stroke patients. From the acute setting all the way to rehabilitation and community reintegration, nursing is there. Having well-educated and highly skilled nurses to monitor and care for stroke patients is crucial. Equally important is the collaboration of colleagues at a national level to facilitate and disseminate research and best practice guidelines across Canada. The National Stroke Nursing Council aims to fill this role. Stroke nurses from across Canada were invited to a national forum in 2005, hosted by the Canadian Stroke Network. The focus of this forum was to elucidate issues of concern to nurses across the stroke care continuum in relation to a Canadian Stroke Strategy. Subsequent to this forum, a cadre of nurses, after undergoing a rigorous screening process, were selected to form the inaugural National Stroke Nursing Council (NSNC). With ongoing support from the Canadian Stroke Network, the mandate of the NSNC is to promote leadership, communication, advocacy, education and nursing research in the field of stroke.

Adoption of alternative habitats by a threatened, "obligate" forest-dwelling bat in a fragmented landscape

While they are among the most ecologically important animals within forest ecosystems, little is known about how bats respond to habitat loss and fragmentation. The threatened lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata), considered to be an obligate deep-forest species, is one of only 2 extant land mammals endemic to New Zealand; it plays a number of important roles within native forests, including pollination and seed dispersal, and rarely occurs in modified forests. We used radiotelemetry to study the movements, roosting behavior, and habitat use of M. tuberculata within a fragmented landscape comprised of 3 main habitat types: open space (harvested forest and pastoral land), native forests, and exotic pine plantations. We found that the bats had smaller home-range areas and travelled shorter nightly distances than populations investigated previously from contiguous native forest. Furthermore, M. tuberculata occupied all 3 habitat types, with native forest being preferred overall. However, individual variation in habitat selection was high, with some bats preferring exotic plantation and open space over native forest. Roosting patterns were similar to those previously observed in contiguous forest; individual bats often switched between communal and solitary roosts. Our findings indicate that M. tuberculata exhibit some degree of behavioral plasticity that allows them to adapt to different landscape mosaics and exploit alternative habitats. To our knowledge, this is the first such documentation of plasticity in habitat use for a bat species believed to be an obligate forest-dweller.

Can’t see the trees for the forest? Why IS-ServQual items matter

Despite longstanding concern with the dimensionality of the service quality construct as measured by ServQual and IS-ServQual instruments, variations on the IS-ServQual instrument have been enduringly prominent in both academic research and practice in the field of IS. We explain the continuing popularity of the instrument based on the salience of the item set for predicting overall customer satisfaction, suggesting that the preoccupation with the dimensions has been a distraction. The implicit mutual exclusivity of the items suggests a more appropriate conceptualization of IS-ServQual as a formative index. This conceptualization resolves the paradox in IS-ServQual research, that of how an instrument with such well-known and well-documented weaknesses continue to be very influential and widely used by academics and practitioners. A formative conceptualization acknowledges and addresses the criticisms of IS-ServQual, while simultaneously explaining its enduring salience by focusing on the items rather than the “dimensions.” By employing an opportunistic sample and adopting the most recent IS-ServQual instrument published in a leading IS journal (virtually, any valid IS- ServQual sample in combination with a previously tested instrument variant would suffice for study purposes), we demonstrate that when re-specified as both first-order and second-order formatives, IS-ServQual has good model quality metrics and high predictive power on customer satisfaction. We conclude that this formative specification has higher practical use and is more defensible theoretically.

Space and time efficiency of the forest-of-quadtrees representation

A forest of quadtrees is a refinement of a quadtree data structure that is used to represent planar regions. A forest of quadtrees provides space savings over regular quadtrees by concentrating vital information. The paper presents some of the properties of a forest of quadtrees and studies the storage requirements for the case in which a single 2m × 2m region is equally likely to occur in any position within a 2n × 2n image. Space and time efficiency are investigated for the forest-of-quadtrees representation as compared with the quadtree representation for various cases.

Tissue culture of forest trees: Clonal multiplication of Eucalyptus grandis L

Axillary shoot proliferation was obtained using explants of Eucalyptus grandis L. juvenile and mature stages on a defined medium. Murashige and Skoog medium (MS) supplemented with benzyladenine (BA), naphthalene acetic acid (NAA) and additional thiamine. Excised shoots were induced to root on a sequence of three media: (1) White's medium containing indoleacetic acid (IAA), NAA and indole butyric acid; (IBA), (2) half-strength MS medium with charcoal and (3) half-strength MS liquid medium. The two types of explants differed in rooting response, with juvenile-derived shoots giving 60% rooting and adult-derived ones only 35%. Thus, the factors limiting cloning of selected trees in vitro are determined to be those controlling rooting of shoots in E. grandis.

Nocturnal Perching of Scarabaeine Dung Beetles (Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae) in an Australian Tropical Rain Forest

Wongabel, a northeastern Queensland tropical, wet, evergreen forest, contains 22 species of Scarabaeinae dung beetles. Five of these species were observed to perch commonly on leaves at night. Length of the beetle and the height of its perch were recorded for each of 56 1 specimens. Unlike the New World tropical dung beetle perchers, no clear evidence was found that small species perched closer to the ground than larger species. The evidence gathered, at least for the four most common perchers, supports the hypothesis that perching is one type of foraging strategy. The similarities and differences between the Australian and New World perchers are discussed.

From council dog catcher to critical scholar

Carol and I just missed each other in the early 1990s: Carol left Manchester for Australia in 1990, while I an·iv·ed in Manchester from Australia in 1993. Sixteen years later and on the very opposite side of the world, we found ourselves sharing an adjacent room during the 2009 Agri-Food Research Network conference in Auckland. Carol was already an accomplished sociologist; I was a newbie PhD student, presenting on a thesis topic that was only just starting to take shape...

Developing African mahogany (Khaya senegalensis) germplasm and its management for a sustainable forest plantation industry in northern Australia: Progress and needs.

The demonstrated wide adaptability, substantial yield potential and proven timber quality of African mahogany (Khaya senegalensis) from plantings of the late 1960s and early 1970s in northern Australia have led to a resurgence of interest in this high-value species. New plantations or trials have been established in several regions since the early 1990s -in four regions in north Queensland, two in the Northern Territory and one in Western Australia. Overall, more than 1500 ha had been planted by early 2007, and the national annual planting from 2007-2008 as currently planned will exceed 2400 ha. Proceedings of two workshops have summarised information available on the species in northern Australia, and suggested research and development (R&D) needs and directions. After an unsustained first phase of domestication of K. senegalensis in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, a second phase began in northern Australia in 2001 focused on conservation and tree improvement that is expected to provide improved planting stock by 2010. Work on other aspects of domestication is also described in this paper: the current estate and plans for extension; site suitability, soils and nutrition; silviculture and management; productivity; pests and diseases; and log and wood properties of a sample of superior trees from two mature plantations of unselected material near Darwin. Some constraints on sustainable plantation development in all these fields are identified and R&D needs proposed. A sustained R&D effort will require a strategic coordinated approach, cooperative implementation and extra funding. Large gains in plantation profitability can be expected to flow from such inputs.

Runoff, sediment loss and water quality from forest roads in a southeast Queensland coastal plain Pinus plantation

Runoff and sediment loss from forest roads were monitored for a two-year period in a Pinus plantation in southeast Queensland. Two classes of road were investigated: a gravelled road, which is used as a primary daily haulage route for the logging area, and an ungravelled road, which provides the main access route for individual logging compartments and is intensively used as a haulage route only during the harvest of these areas (approximately every 30 years). Both roads were subjected to routine traffic loads and maintenance during the study. Surface runoff in response to natural rainfall was measured and samples taken for the determination of sediment and nutrient (total nitrogen, total phosphorus, dissolved organic carbon and total iron) loads from each road. Results revealed that the mean runoff coefficient (runoff depth/rainfall depth) was consistently higher from the gravelled road plot with 0.57, as compared to the ungravelled road with 0.38. Total sediment loss over the two-year period was greatest from the gravelled road plot at 5.7 t km−1 compared to the ungravelled road plot with 3.9 t km−1. Suspended solids contributed 86% of the total sediment loss from the gravelled road, and 72% from the ungravelled road over the two years. Nitrogen loads from the two roads were both relatively constant throughout the study, and averaged 5.2 and 2.9 kg km−1 from the gravelled and ungravelled road, respectively. Mean annual phosphorus loads were 0.6 kg km−1 from the gravelled road and 0.2 kg km−1 from the ungravelled road. Organic carbon and total iron loads increased in the second year of the study, which was a much wetter year, and are thought to reflect the breakdown of organic matter in roadside drains and increased sediment generation, respectively. When road and drain maintenance (grading) was performed runoff and sediment loss were increased from both road types. Additionally, the breakdown of the gravel road base due to high traffic intensity during wet conditions resulted in the formation of deep (10 cm) ruts which increased erosion. The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP):Road model was used to compare predicted to observed runoff and sediment loss from the two road classes investigated. For individual rainfall events, WEPP:Road predicted output showed strong agreement with observed values of runoff and sediment loss. WEPP:Road predictions for annual sediment loss from the entire forestry road network in the study area also showed reasonable agreement with the extrapolated observed values.

ESTIMATION OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION IN AN EXPERIMENTAL WATERSHED IN A DECIDUOUS FOREST OF SOUTH INDIA

Forested areas play a dominant role in the global hydrological cycle. Evapotranspiration is a dominant component most of the time catching up with the rainfall. Though there are sophisticated methods which are available for its estimation, a simple reliable tool is needed so that a good budgeting could be made. Studies have established that evapotranspiration in forested areas is much higher than in agricultural areas. Latitude, type of forests, climate and geological characteristics also add to the complexity of its estimation. Few studies have compared different methods of evapotranspiration on forested watersheds in semi arid tropical forests. In this paper a comparative study of different methods of estimation of evapotranspiration is made with reference to the actual measurements made using all parameter climatological station data of a small deciduous forested watershed of Mulehole (area of 4.5 km2 ), South India. Potential evapotranspiration (ETo) was calculated using ten physically based and empirical methods. Actual evapotranspiration (AET) has been calculated through computation of water balance through SWAT model. The Penman-Montieth method has been used as a benchmark to compare the estimates arrived at using various methods. The AET calculated shows good agreement with the curve for evapotranspiration for forests worldwide. Error estimates have been made with respect to Penman-Montieth method. This study could give an idea of the errors involved whenever methods with limited data are used and also show the use indirect methods in estimation of Evapotranspiration which is more suitable for regional scale studies.