Mapping landscape features and values in coastal Australia

Places encompass the physical setting, as well as human experience and interpretation. Although sense of place definition nominally includes the physical environment, most research has emphasized the social construction of sense of place and neglect the important contribution of the physical environment to place meanings and attachment. On the other side, theoretical and technological developments during the past decades resulted in significant sophistication and power of analysis, display, and interpretation of spatial information applied in landscape analysis. This development, however, remains disconnected from the socio-political realities of the communities and regions which are the subject of these studies. There is a research need to integrate public perceptions and attitudes with the type of information typically found in a landscape assessment. A challenge of GIS is whether or not Cartesian space can be adapted to incorporate a more humanistic sense and understanding of distance, direction, and position.

Visual networking : Australia's media landscape

Australia is in the midst of a massive transformation of its communication infrastructure. The AUD43 billion Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) to be set up by the wholly Federal government-owned NBNCo Limited (NBNCo), is the largest infrastructure project ever proposed in Australia (NBN, 2010). It has the capacity to combine features and technologies that were once separate, but now have converged, including computing, telephony, free-to-air (FTA) television, direct-to-home satellite broadcasting, radio and the internet. This means that current thinking about these media technologies, developed through the process of convergence as well as regulation, requires review. Future services for digital television are going to be more akin to app-based functions currently available on mobiles and tablets but accessed via the television screen rather than the PC. Against such a background, this article examines the Australian ‘televisual’ space, arguing that faster broadband and internet-enabled televisions for movies, shows, communication and more, when it suits the audience, are the keys to television’s survival through visually networked possibilities.

Charting Australia Felix : re-interpreting cultural landscape creation through a land health lens

The landscape of the Western District of Victoria has been extensively transformed in the imagery and aspirations of United Kingdom estates but markedly modified to address the climatic and agricultural prospects of the District landscape. By assembling land, the original squatters had a clean sheet to map, comprehend, and configure an economically viable pastoral estate. ‘Charting Australia Felix’ seeks to ascertain the spatial and geographical logic and rationale that informed this pastoral estate formation. These settlers mastered an economically viable estate that respected climate, soil quality and ensured water security which were the essential ingredients of a quality land holding; their successful grazing and specialisation were dependent upon these attributes. Thus, they successfully comprehended the essences of the landscape in line with contemporary land care and rural land management strategies. Charting Australia Felix involves the use of the historic landscape characterisation method to map, assess and model some 5 exemplar pastoral stations in the Western District to quantify their temporal landscape characteristics, their responses to landscape evolution, and change to test and quantify what the archetypes are that may have informed these patterns. Using Murndal and Glenormiston pastoral stations as the lens of investigation, a preliminary appraisal is offered in this paper.

A new child protection strategy for Aboriginal communities in Western Australia

Despite numerous government inquiries and reforms, child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities is a well-documented, ongoing problem. Established in Western Australia in 2009, Operation RESET is a multi-agency proactive community engagement initiative designed to improve the ability of communities and supporting agencies to detect, respond to and prevent child sexual abuse through the implementation of community engagement, capacity building and educational strategies. This comment describes the three core principles of Operation RESET: tackling child sexual abuse requires a collaborative, proactive approach between government and communities; the underlying causes and context of child sexual abuse must be recognised; and children's overall safety and wellbeing must be enhanced through integrated services that strengthen and empower families and communities. It also enumerates the seven phases of the operation's implementation, from identifying target communities to deploying an exit strategy. The comment ends by addressing the importance of empirical evaluation.

Riparian vegetation has disproportionate benefits for landscape-scale conservation of woodland birds in highly modified environments

1. Identifying landscape patterns that allow native fauna to coexist with human land use is a global challenge. Riparian vegetation often persists in anthropogenic environments as strips of natural or semi-natural vegetation that provide habitat for many terrestrial species. Its relative contribution to landscape-scale conservation is likely to change as environments become increasingly modified. We used a ‘whole of landscape’ approach to test the hypothesis that riparian vegetation offers disproportionate benefits, relative to non-riparian vegetation, for the conservation of woodland birds in highly modified agricultural landscapes. 2. We selected 24 landscapes, each 100 km2, along a gradient of landscape change represented by decreasing cover of native vegetation (from 60% to <2%), in an agricultural region in SE Australia. Bird species were systematically surveyed at three riparian and seven non-riparian sites in wooded vegetation in each landscape. 3. Riparian sites supported a greater richness of woodland-dependent species, a group of conservation concern, than did non-riparian sites. The composition of assemblages also differed between site types. 4. At the landscape scale, the pooled richness of bird assemblages at riparian and non-riparian sites, respectively, decreased with overall loss of tree cover despite constant sampling effort. Within landscapes, the β-diversity of woodland species among non-riparian sites increased (composition became less similar) as landscape tree cover declined. In contrast, riparian assemblages were relatively stable with no change in β-diversity. Importantly, as landscape tree cover declined, the proportion of woodland species uniquely present at riparian sites increased and made a greater contribution to overall landscape diversity. 5. Synthesis and applications. Landscape-scale richness of woodland species declines as landscape tree cover is lost. In highly depleted landscapes, riparian vegetation retains a relatively rich, stable assemblage compared with that in heterogeneous remnants of non-riparian vegetation and consequently contributes disproportionately to landscape-scale diversity. These observations, together with the diverse benefits of riparian vegetation for aquatic ecosystems, mean that protection and restoration of riparian vegetation is a high priority in anthropogenic environments. Importantly, such actions are directly amenable to individual land managers, and the benefits will accumulate to enhance the persistence and conservation of species at landscape and regional scales.

Bushfire catastrophe in Victoria, Australia : public record, accountability, commemoration, memorialization and heritage protection

In Australia, 7 February 2009 has become known as ‘Black Saturday’ because of the bushfire catastrophe that took 173 lives and devastated communities in the central parts of the State of Victoria. The paper considers how the 2009 fires have been recorded, how the issue of accountability has been dealt with, particularly in relation to the State and its agencies but also individual residents in the fire-devastated areas, and how bushfire deaths and other losses have been commemorated through remembrance events and museum collection projects and memorialized through the creation of new monuments and the protection of remaining physical structures as official heritage. Despite the major impact of bushfires on the State, to date few bushfire-related places have been protected. The former Cockatoo Kindergarten, which acted as a community refuge during an earlier catastrophic Victorian bushfire on Ash Wednesday, 16 February 1983, is an exception. Inscribed in 2012, the former kindergarten is the only bushfire-related place inscribed on the Victorian Heritage Register, in this case for its historical and social value as a place resonating with other communities affected by other bushfires and helping the broader Victorian public to come to terms with bushfire catastrophe. But, while bushfire commemoration activities and physical memorials, like those relating to war, help many societies remember individual and community pain and suffering, they can divert attention from the more fundamental questions of why they were there in the first place and what must be done to ensure the same catastrophe does not recur in the future. In this regard, the paper questions the oft-cited claim that bushfires are embedded in the Australian psyche, seeing links between the rhetoric around bushfire survival and Australian myth-making and nation-building.

A landscape-scale, applied fire management experiment promotes recovery of a population of the threatened Gouldian Finch, Erythrura gouldiae, in Australia's tropical savannas

Fire is an integral part of savanna ecology and changes in fire patterns are linked to biodiversity loss in savannas worldwide. In Australia, changed fire regimes are implicated in the contemporary declines of small mammals, riparian species, obligate-seeding plants and grass seed-eating birds. Translating this knowledge into management to recover threatened species has proved elusive. We report here on a landscape-scale experiment carried out by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) on Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary in northwest Australia. The experiment was designed to understand the response of a key savanna bird guild to fire, and to use that information to manage fire with the aim of recovering a threatened species population. We compared condition indices among three seed-eating bird species-one endangered (Gouldian finch) and two non-threatened (long-tailed finch and double-barred finch)-from two large areas (> 2,830 km2) with initial contrasting fire regimes ('extreme': frequent, extensive, intense fire; versus 'benign': less frequent, smaller, lower intensity fires). Populations of all three species living with the extreme fire regime had condition indices that differed from their counterparts living with the benign fire regime, including higher haematocrit levels in some seasons (suggesting higher levels of activity required to find food), different seasonal haematocrit profiles, higher fat scores in the early wet season (suggesting greater food uncertainty), and then lower muscle scores later in the wet season (suggesting prolonged food deprivation). Gouldian finches also showed seasonally increasing stress hormone concentrations with the extreme fire regime. Cumulatively, these patterns indicated greater nutritional stress over many months for seed-eating birds exposed to extreme fire regimes. We tested these relationships by monitoring finch condition over the following years, as AWC implemented fire management to produce the 'benign' fire regime throughout the property. The condition indices of finch populations originally living with the extreme fire regime shifted to resemble those of their counterparts living with the benign fire regime. This research supports the hypothesis that fire regimes affect food resources for savanna seed-eating birds, with this impact mediated through a range of grass species utilised by the birds over different seasons, and that fire management can effectively moderate that impact. This work provides a rare example of applied research supporting the recovery of a population of a threatened species.

Fire severity and fire-induced landscape heterogeneity affect arboreal mammals in fire-prone forests

In fire-prone regions, wildfire influences spatial and temporal patterns of landscape heterogeneity. The likely impacts of climate change on the frequency and intensity of wildfire highlights the importance of understanding how fire-induced heterogeneity may affect different components of the biota. Here, we examine the influence of wildfire, as an agent of landscape heterogeneity, on the distribution of arboreal mammals in fire-prone forests in south-eastern Australia. First, we used a stratified design to examine the role of topography, and the relative influence of fire severity and fire history, on the occurrence of arboreal mammals 2-3 years after wildfire. Second, we investigated the influence of landscape context on the occurrence of arboreal mammals at severely burnt sites. Forested gullies supported a higher abundance of arboreal mammals than slopes. Fire severity was the strongest influence, with abundance lower at severely burnt than unburnt sites. The occurrence of mammals at severely burned sites was influenced by landscape context: abundance increased with increasing amount of unburnt and understorey-only burnt forest within a 1 km radius. These results support the hypothesis that unburnt forest and moist gullies can serve as refuges for fauna in the post-fire environment and assist recolonization of severely burned forest. They highlight the importance of spatial heterogeneity created by wildfire and the need to incorporate spatial aspects of fire regimes (e.g., creation and protection of refuges) for fire management in fire-prone landscapes.

Landscape changes in Serra do Japi: legal protection or scientific expectation?

The creation of new legally protected areas brings many conflicts that distance the real landscape from the expected according to environmental law or conservation researchers. In this study, we mapped and compared the changes in Serra da Japi (Sao Paulo State, Brazil) throughout 40 years with scenarios of legal protection and scientific expectation on forest conservation, to evaluate the distance between them. This may allow us to infer the direction of historical changes and assist in the debate among decision makers. The results showed that most legal requirements on forest protection in the current landscape have been met. The 1960s was the period when the forest cover was closest to the desirable conservation stage. Although the Serra do Japi has maintained large areas of forests during the entire study period, human interference increased with the expansion of reforestation and urban areas, and access roads were identified as a primary potential driving forces of change. In addition, habitat loss was observed in the landscape, which can represent the first phase of a sequence of modifications detrimental to the environmental conservation of this protected area, including decision changes to land use. In conclusion, the changes evolved toward conservation expectations, but not toward the forest configuration of scientific expectation.

Western Australia. Correspondence relating to the proposed abolition of the Aborigines Protection Board of Western Australia ...

Mode of access: Internet.