Increasing Food Production Sustainably in a Changing Climate : Understanding the Pressures and Potential

Australian agriculture is faced with the dilemma of increasing food production for a growing domestic and world population while decreasing environmental impacts and supporting the social and economic future of regional communities. The challenge for farmers is compounded by declining rates of productivity growth which have been linked to changes in climate and decreasing investment in agricultural research. The answer must lie in understanding the ecological functionality of landscapes and matching management of agricultural systems and use of natural resources to landscape capacity in a changing climate. A simplified mixed grain and livestock farm case study is used to illustrate the challenges of assessing the potential for shifts in land allocation between commodities to achieve sustainable intensification of nutrition production. This study highlights the risks associated with overly-simplistic solutions and the need for increased investment in research to inform the development of practical strategies for increasing food production in Australian agro-ecosystems while managing the impacts of climate change and addressing climate change mitigation policies.

A comparative analysis of the integration of SOA elements in widely-used enterprise architecture frameworks

In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured increasing interest as a means to systematically consolidate and manage various enterprise artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support for business/IT alignment and business/IT landscapes management. To provide a holistic perspective on the enterprise over time, EA frameworks need to co-evolve with the changes in the enterprise and its IT over time. In this paper we focus on the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). There is a need to integrate SOA with EA to keep EA relevant and to use EA products to help drive successful SOA. This paper investigates and compares the integration of SOA elements in five widely used EA frameworks: Archimate, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF), Department of Defence Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and the Ministry of Defence Architecture Framework (MODAF). It identifies what SOA elements are considered and their relative position in the overall structure. The results show that services and related elements are far from being well-integrated constructs in current EA frameworks and that the different EA frameworks integrated SOA elements in substantially different ways. Our results can support the academic EA and SOA communities with a closer and more consistent integration of EA and SOA and support practitioners in identifying an EA framework that provides the SOA support that matches their requirements.

Fluid Infrastructure : A response to a natural flood disaster in Brisbane

Fluid Infrastructure: Landscape Architecture Exhibition: This exhibition showcases the work of 4th Year undergraduate landscape architecture students in response to the 2011 Queensland floods through five installations: Systima Fluid Flux Flex Fluid Connectivity The Floods Verge Fluid Evolution The focus of these installations is the post-flood conditions of Brisbane’s riverside public infrastructure, within a scenario of flood as a normalised event. It recognises that within this scenario, parts of this city cannot be described as definitively ‘land’ or ‘water,’ but are best described as ‘fluid terrains’(Mathur, A. and Da Cunha, D. 2006). The landscape design propositions within the five installations include public transport diversification (RiverRats) schemes, greenspace elevations, ephemeral gardens and evolving landscapes, creative interpretation and warning devices and systems. These propositions do not resist fluid conditions, but work with them to propose a more resilient urban river landscape than Brisbane currently has. This QUT exhibition was developed as part of the 2011 Flood of Ideas Project (http://www.floodofideas.org.au) in partnership with Healthy Waterways (Water by Design), State Library of Queensland (The Edge), Brisbane City Council, Australian Institute of Architects, University of Queensland, Green Cross Australia, Stormwater Industry Association.

No evidence for change in oviposition behaviour of Helicoverpa armigera (Hubner) (Lepidoptera : Noctuidae) after widespread adoption of transgenic insecticidal cotton

Cotton growing landscapes in Australia have been dominated by dual-toxin transgenic Bt varieties since 2004. The cotton crop has thus effectively become a sink for the main target pest, Helicoverpa armigera. Theory predicts that there should be strong selection on female moths to avoid laying on such plants. We assessed oviposition, collected from two cotton-growing regions, by female moths when given a choice of tobacco, cotton and cabbage. Earlier work in the 1980s and 1990s on populations from the same geographic locations indicated these hosts were on average ranked as high, mid and low preference plants, respectively, and that host rankings had a heritable component. In the present study, we found no change in the relative ranking of hosts by females, with most eggs being laid on tobacco, then cotton and least on cabbage. As in earlier work, some females laid most eggs on cotton and aspects of oviposition behaviour had a heritable component. Certainly, cotton is not avoided as a host, and the implications of these finding for managing resistance to Bt cotton are discussed.

Landscape meaning and design : a new case study methodology

Understanding the effects of design interventions on the meanings people associate with landscapes is important to critical and ethical practice in landscape architecture. Case study research has become a common way researchers evaluate design interventions and related issues, with a standardised method promoted by the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF). However, the method is somewhat undeveloped for interpreting landscape meanings – something most commonly undertaken as historic landscape studies, but not as studies of design effect. This research proposes a new method for such interpretation, using a case study of Richard Haag’s radical 1971 proposal for a new kind of park on the site of the former Seattle gas works.

Fraud risk and the visibility of carbon

In recent years, carbon has been increasingly rendered ‘visible’ both discursively and through political processes that have imbued it with economic value. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been constructed as social and environmental costs and their reduction or avoidance as social and economic gain. The ‘marketisation’ of carbon, which has been facilitated through various compliance schemes such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the Kyoto Protocol, the proposed Australian Emissions Reduction Scheme and through the voluntary carbon credit market, have attempted to bring carbon into the ‘foreground’ as an economic liability and/or opportunity. Accompanying the increasing economic visibility of carbon are reports of frauds and scams – the ‘gaming of carbon markets’(Chan 2010). As Lohmann (2010: 21) points out, ‘what are conventionally classed as scams or frauds are an inevitable feature of carbon offset markets, not something that could be eliminated by regulation targeting the specific businesses or state agencies involved’. This paper critiques the disparate discourses of fraud risk in carbon markets and examines cases of fraud within emerging landscapes of green criminology.

Learning English by walking down the street

With internationalisation and globalisation, English has proliferated in urban spaces around the world. This creates new opportunities for EFL learning and teaching. An English literacy walk is one activity that can be used productively to capitalise on this potential. The activity has roots in: (i) long-established approaches to emergent literacy education for young children; and (ii) pedagogic projects inspired by recent research on linguistic landscapes. Drawing on these traditions, teachers can target reading outcomes involving code, semantic, pragmatic and critical knowledge and skills. We use the four resources model of literate practices to systematically map some of the potential of literacy walks in multilingual, multimodal linguistic landscapes. We suggest tasks and teacher questions that might be used for purposes of explicit teaching of reading during and after literacy walks. Although grounded in Taipei, our ideas might be of interest to EFL teachers in other globalised cities around the world.

Library Research Support in developing, testing and promoting an open cyberinfrastructure

QUT Library continues to rethink research support with eResearch as a primary driver. The support to the development of the Lens, an open global cyberinfrastructure, has been especially important in the light of technology transfer promotion, and partly in the response to researchers’ needs in following the innovation landscapes not only within the scientific but also patent literature. The Lens http://www.lens.org/lens/ project makes innovation more efficient, fair, transparent and inclusive. It is a joint effort between Cambia http://www.cambia.org.au and Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The Lens serves more than 84 million patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data. Users can link from search results to visualization and document clusters; from a patent document description to its full-text; from there, if applicable, the sequence data can also be found. Figure 1 shows a BLAST Alignment (DNA) using the Lens. A unique feature of the Lens is the ability to embed search and BLAST results into blogs and websites, and provide real-time updates to them. PatSeq Explorer http://www.lens.org/lens/bio/patseqexplorer allows users to navigate patent sequences that map onto the human genome and in the future, many other genomes. PatSeq Explorer offers three level views for the sequence information and links each group of sequences at the chromosomal level to their corresponding patent documents in the Lens. By integrating sequence and patent search and document clustering capabilities, users can now understand the big and small details on the true extent and scope of genetic sequence patents. QUT Library supported Cambia in developing, testing and promoting the Lens. This poster demonstrates QUT Library’s provision of best practice and holistic research support to a research group and how QUT Librarians have acquired new capabilities to meet the needs of the researchers beyond traditional research support practices.

Growing biodiverse carbon-rich forests

Regrowing forests on cleared land is a key strategy to achieve both biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation globally. Maximizing these co-benefits, however, remains theoretically and technically challenging because of the complex relationship between carbon sequestration and biodiversity in forests, the strong influence of climate variability and landscape position on forest development, the large number of restoration strategies possible, and long time-frames needed to declare success. Through the synthesis of three decades of knowledge on forest dynamics and plant functional traits combined with decision science, we demonstrate that we cannot always maximize carbon sequestration by simply increasing the functional trait diversity of trees planted. The relationships between plant functional diversity, carbon sequestration rates above-ground and in the soil are dependent on climate and landscape positions. We show how to manage ‘identities’ and ‘complementarities’ between plant functional traits in order to achieve systematically maximal co-benefits in various climate and landscape contexts. We provide examples of optimal planting and thinning rules that satisfy this ecological strategy and guide the restoration of forests that are rich in both carbon and plant functional diversity. Our framework provides the first mechanistic approach for generating decision-making rules that can be used to manage forests for multiple objectives, and supports joined carbon credit and biodiversity conservation initiatives, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation REDD+. The decision framework can also be linked to species distribution models and socio-economic models in order to find restoration solutions that maximize simultaneously biodiversity, carbon stocks and other ecosystem services across landscapes. Our study provides the foundation for developing and testing cost-effective and adaptable forest management rules to achieve biodiversity, carbon sequestration and other socio-economic co-benefits under global change.

Waterfalls, science and aesthetics

Waterfalls and rapids are a subject of study by scientists and scholars from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds. Unlike cave research, known as speleology, which also involves many different disciplines, the study of waterfalls is not generally regarded as a distinct branch of knowledge. Long neglected as subjects of research, waterfalls have received considerable attention since the 1980s. This paper traces the study of waterfalls from the late eighteenth century, a period when both a scientific and an aesthetic interest in landscape developed in Europe, to the present. The work of geographers, geologists and others who studied landforms and landscapes is examined, with particular attention to those who expressed a special interest in waterfalls, notably Alexander von Humboldt. The study argues that the scientific and aesthetic approaches to landscape research are not incompatible and supports the view that both are necessary for a full understanding and appreciation of the environment in which we live.

Finding Carpentaria

Invited – and inspired – by Rikki Gunn of GhostNets Australia, in September 2008 sixteen Queensland University of Technology (QUT) design and engineering students and four staff set off on a 2488km journey to spend a fortnight in Karumba on the Gulf of Carpentaria. We went to undertake a strategic planning project we called Linking Karumba, to encourage social, economic, environmental and cultural linkages across the town. During this visit, we and our local project partners realised there should be a second half to the project, in the other Carpentaria Shire town of Normanton, which saw another group of us travelling north again in 2010 to undertake Get EnGulfed: Normanton2020, looking back and forwards to propose strategies to strengthen local and regional identities. The responsiveness of our students’ work to the character of Carpentarian culture and environment indicate remarkable levels of immersion, and the community expressed their enjoyment of the process and outcomes. As for us - QUT staff and students - we had a marvellous time doing these projects, and this little book is the story of our finding of the landscapes and communities of Carpentaria “where the outback meets the sea”, and of the project work we did together with locals in the two towns. We go to press as news arrives of the official opening of the Karumba Walking track, linking the two parts of the town. We can’t wait to return and make the walk. Shannon Satherley, 2013

Pleasures, perversities, and partnerships : the historical emergence of LGBT-police relationships

Relationships between LGBT people and police have been turbulent for some time now, and have been variously characterized as supportive (McGhee, 2004) and antagonistic (Radford, Betts, & Ostermeyer, 2006). These relationships were, and continue to be, influenced by a range of political, legal, cultural, and social factors. This chapter will examine historical and social science accounts of LGBT-police histories to chart the historical peaks and troughs in these relationships. The discussion demonstrates how, in Western contexts, we oscillate between historical moments of police criminalizing homosexual perversity and contemporary landscapes of partnership between police and LGBT people. However, the chapter challenges the notion that it is possible to trace this as a lineal progression from a painful past to a more productive present. Rather, it focuses on specific moments, marked by pain or pleasure or both, and how these moments emerge and re-emerge in ways that shaped LGBT-police landscapes in potted, uneven ways. The chapter concludes noting how, although certain ideas and police practices may shift towards more progressive notions of partnership policing, we cannot just take away the history that emerged out of mistrust and pain.

Grand tours in the glare of the sun : harnessing digital media to develop cultural tourism in Queensland, Australia

It has been well established that highlighting the cultural attributes of a region through stories of place, local histories, and the creative arts boosts tourism income to a region. Cultural tourism also serves to promote the creative industries to visitors and residents alike and, by enhancing a region’s cultural identity, fosters new opportunities for the arts. It can therefore offer considerable potential benefit to the creative economy in Australia. However, in comparison with Europe, where cultural tourism can rely upon an established historical, artistic and literary cultural identity that stretches back to Grand Tours of the seventeenth century, in Queensland, Australia the relatively new enterprise of cultural tourism must compete with visitor expectations of sun, surf and the natural landscapes, which have become the mainstay of tourism advertising. Moreover, in Queensland, it is essential to connect vast distances, diverse communities and a variety of cultural experiences. We must also take account of the expectations of contemporary tourists, who anticipate a digitally mediated travel experience and increasingly seek to connect with local communities in authentic ways. In this paper we consider the unique considerations that must be taken into account in the Queensland context and propose approaches to developing an integrated identity that embraces both the ‘great outdoors’ and the region’s cultural attributes. We make recommendations for providing the types of digitally mediated ‘local’ experiences that cultural tourists now expect, and illustrate the design principles we propose through early, tentative approaches to smart phones, locative media and augmented reality applications for cultural tourism in the region. We conclude by proposing additional ways to formulate a digital strategy in line with the recommendations we make.

Metrics challenges for monographs

The history of impact metrics as a field driven by the sciences presents real problems for Arts and Humanities scholars. Whereas scientists have long depended on journal articles as a primary mechanism for publishing findings, researchers in the Arts and Humanities tend to publish in a much wider range of formats. For many Arts and Humanities scholars, conference presentations, creative works, reports and scholarly monographs are legitimate, valuable and valued forms of publication. Bizarre as it may seem, even the best-established and most respected format for the publication of Humanities scholarship, the scholarly monograph, is often invisible within digital metrics landscapes. As a result, although some information about Arts and Humanities scholars may be captured by impact metrics, academics from these fields always appear to perform less well than colleagues in the Sciences when measured using tools designed for scientists.

Violence in and around entertainment districts : a longitudinal analysis of the impact of late-night lockout legislation

Violence in entertainment districts is a major problem across urban landscapes throughout the world. Research shows that licensed premises are the third most common location for homicides and serious assaults, accounting for one in ten fatal and nonfatal assaults. One class of interventions that aims to reduce violence in entertainment districts involves the use of civil remedies: a group of strategies that use civil or regulatory measures as legal “levers” to reduce problem behavior. One specific civil remedy used to reduce problematic behavior in entertainment districts involves manipulation of licensed premise trading hours. This article uses generalized linear models to analyze the impact of lockout legislation on recorded violent offences in two entertainment districts in the Australian state of Queensland. Our research shows that 3 a.m. lockout legislation led to a direct and significant reduction in the number of violent incidents inside licensed premises. Indeed, the lockouts cut the level of violent crime inside licensed premises by half. Despite these impressive results for the control of violence inside licensed premises, we found no evidence that the lockout had any impact on violence on streets and footpaths outside licensed premises that were the site for more than 80 percent of entertainment district violence. Overall, however, our analysis suggests that lockouts are an important mechanism that helps to control the level of violence inside licensed premises but that finely grained contextual responses to alcohol-related problems are needed rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.