Tools of the trade : a listing of materials and equipment for managing museum collections.

Mode of access: Internet.

Population monitoring for kangaroo management

In wildlife management, the program of monitoring will depend on the management objective. If the objective is damage mitigation, then ideally it is damage that should be monitored. Alternatively, population size (N) can be used as a surrogate for damage, but the relationship between N and damage obviously needs to be known. If the management objective is a sustainable harvest, then the system of monitoring will depend on the harvesting strategy. In general, the harvest strategy in all states has been to offer a quota that is a constant proportion of population size. This strategy has a number of advantages over alternative strategies, including a low risk of over- or underharvest in a stochastic environment, simplicity, robustness to bias in population estimates and allowing harvest policy to be proactive rather than reactive. However, the strategy requires an estimate of absolute population size that needs to be made regularly for a fluctuating population. Trends in population size and in various harvest statistics, while of interest, are secondary. This explains the large research effort in further developing accurate estimation methods for kangaroo populations. Direct monitoring on a large scale is costly. Aerial surveys are conducted annually at best, and precision of population estimates declines with the area over which estimates are made. Management at a fine scale (temporal or spatial) therefore requires other monitoring tools. Indirect monitoring through harvest statistics and habitat models, that include rainfall or a greenness index from satellite imagery, may prove useful.

Screening for physical activity in family practice - Evaluation of two brief assessment tools

Background: Physical activity (PA) is relevant to the prevention and management of many health conditions in family practice. There is a need for an efficient, reliable, and valid assessment tool to identify patients in need of PA interventions. Methods: Twenty-eight family physicians in three Australian cities assessed the PA of their adult patients during 2004 using either a two- (2Q) or three-question (3Q) assessment. This was administered again approximately 3 days later to evaluate test-retest reliability. Concurrent validity was evaluated by measuring agreement with the Active Australia Questionnaire, and criterion validity by comparison with 7-day Computer Science Applications, Inc. (CSA) accelerometer counts. Results: A total of 509 patients participated, with 428 (84%) completing a repeat assessment, and 415 (82%) accelerometer monitoring. The brief assessments had moderate test-retest reliability (2Q k = 58.0%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 47.2-68.8%; 3Q k = 55.6%, 95% CI = 43.8-67.4%); fair to moderate concurrent validity (2Q k = 46.7%, 95% CI = 35.657.9%; 3Q k = 38.7%, 95% CI = 26.4-51.1%); and poor to fair criterion validity (2Q k = 18.2%, 95% CI = 3.9-32.6%; 3Q k = 24.3%, 95% CI = 11.6-36.9%) for identifying patients as sufficiently active. A four-level scale of PA derived from the PA assessments was significantly correlated with accelerometer minutes (2Q rho = 0.39, 95% CI = 0.28-0.49; 3Q rho = 0.31, 95% CI = 0.18-0.43). Physicians reported that the assessments took I to 2 minutes to complete. Conclusions: Both PA assessments were feasible to use in family practice, and were suitable for identifying the least active patients. The 2Q assessment was preferred by clinicians and may be most appropriate for dissemination.

Adaptive management and its role in managing Great Barrier Reef water quality

Adaptive management is the pathway to effective conservation, use and management of Australia’s coastal catchments and waterways. While the concepts of adaptive management are not new, applications involving both assessment and management responses are indeed limited at the national and regional scales. This paper outlines the components of a systematic framework for linking scientific knowledge, existing tools, planning approaches and participatory processes to achieve healthy regional partnerships between community, industry, government agencies and science providers to overcome institutional barriers and uncoordinated monitoring. The framework developed by the Coastal CRC (www.coastal.crc.org.au/amf/amf_index.htm) is hierarchical in the way it displays information to allow associated frameworks to be integrated, and represents a construct in which processes, information, decision tools and outcomes are brought together in a structured and transparent way for adaptive catchment and coastal management. This paper proposes how an adaptive management approach could be used to benefit the implementation of the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (RWQPP).

Healthy waterways: Healthy catchments - An integrated research/management program to understand and reduce impacts of sediments and nutrients on waterways in Queensland, Australia

The Moreton Bay Waterways and Catchments Partnership, now branded the Healthy Waterways Partnership, has built on the experience of the past 15 years here in South East Queensland (SEQ). It focuses on water quality and the ecosystem health of our freshwater, estuarine and marine systems through the implementation of actions by individual partners and the collective oversight of a regional work program that assists partners to prioritise their investments and address emerging issues. This regional program includes monitoring, reporting, marketing and communication, development of decision support tools, research that is directed to problem solving, and maintaining extensive consultative and engagement arrangements. The Partnership has produced information-based outcomes which have led to significant cost savings in the protection of water quality and ecosystem resources by its stakeholders. This has been achieved by: – providing a clear focus for management actions that has ownership of governments, industry and community; – targeted scientific research to address issues requiring appropriate management actions; – management actions based on a sound understanding of the waterways and rigorous public consultation; and, – development and implementation of a strategy that incorporates commitments from all levels of stakeholders. While focusing on our waterways, the Partnership’s approach includes addressing catchment management issues particularly relating to the management of diffuse pollution sources in both urban and rural landscapes as well as point source loads. We are now working with other stakeholders to develop a framework for integrated water management that will link water quality and water quantity goals and priorities.

Biodiversity conservation planning tools: Present status and challenges for the future

Species extinctions and the deterioration of other biodiversity features worldwide have led to the adoption of systematic conservation planning in many regions of the world. As a consequence, various software tools for conservation planning have been developed over the past twenty years. These, tools implement algorithms designed to identify conservation area networks for the representation and persistence of biodiversity features. Budgetary, ethical, and other sociopolitical constraints dictate that the prioritized sites represent biodiversity with minimum impact on human interests. Planning tools are typically also used to satisfy these criteria. This chapter reviews both the concepts and technical choices that underlie the development of these tools. Conservation planning problems can be formulated as optimization problems, and we evaluate the suitability of different algorithms for their solution. Finally, we also review some key issues associated with the use of these tools, such as computational efficiency, the effectiveness of taxa and abiotic parameters at choosing surrogates for biodiversity, the process of setting explicit targets of representation for biodiversity surrogates, and

Costs and decisions in population management: Koalas on Kangaroo Island

Many populations have a negative impact on their habitat, or upon other species in the environment, if their numbers become too large. For this reason they are often managed using some form of control. The objective is to keep numbers at a sustainable level, while ensuring survival of the population.+Here we present models that allow population management programs to be assessed. Two common control regimes will be considered: reduction and suppression. Under the suppression regime the previous population is maintained close to a particular threshold through near continuous control, while under the reduction regime, control begins once the previous population reaches a certain threshold and continues until it falls below a lower pre-defined level. We discuss how to best choose the control parameters, and we provide tools that allow population managers to select reduction levels and control rates. Additional tools will be provided to assess the effect of different control regimes, in terms of population persistence and cost.In particular we consider the effects of each regime on the probability of extinction and the expected time to extinction, and compare the control methods in terms of the expected total cost of each regime over the life of the population. The usefulness of our results will be illustrated with reference to the control of a koala population inhabiting Kangaroo Island, Australia.

On aggregation issues in spatial data management

Large amounts of information can be overwhelming and costly to process, especially when transmitting data over a network. A typical modern Geographical Information System (GIS) brings all types of data together based on the geographic component of the data and provides simple point-and-click query capabilities as well as complex analysis tools. Querying a Geographical Information System, however, can be prohibitively expensive due to the large amounts of data which may need to be processed. Since the use of GIS technology has grown dramatically in the past few years, there is now a need more than ever, to provide users with the fastest and least expensive query capabilities, especially since an approximated 80 % of data stored in corporate databases has a geographical component. However, not every application requires the same, high quality data for its processing. In this paper we address the issues of reducing the cost and response time of GIS queries by preaggregating data by compromising the data accuracy and precision. We present computational issues in generation of multi-level resolutions of spatial data and show that the problem of finding the best approximation for the given region and a real value function on this region, under a predictable error, in general is "NP-complete.

Benchmarking project management practices of Caribbean organizations using analytic hierarchy process

Effective management of projects is becoming increasingly important for any type of organization to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment due to pressure of globalization. The use of benchmarking is widening as a technique for supporting project management. Benchmarking can be described as the search for the best practices, leading to the superior performance of an organization. However, effectiveness of benchmarking depends on the use of tools for collecting and analyzing information and deriving subsequent improvement projects. This study demonstrates how analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multiple attribute decision-making technique, can be used for benchmarking project management practices. The entire methodology has been applied to benchmark project management practice of Caribbean public sector organizations with organizations in the Indian petroleum sector, organizations in the infrastructure sector of Thailand and the UK. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed benchmarking model using AHP, determines problems and issues of Caribbean project management in the public sector and suggests improvement measures for effective project management.

Re-engineering materials management: a case study on an Indian refinery

Materials management function is always a major concern to the management of any industrial organisation as high inventory and an inefficient procurement process affect the profitability to a great extent. Problems multiply due to a very current business environment in India. Hence, existing materials planning and procurement processes and inventory management systems require a re-look with respect to a changing business environment. This study shows a radical improvement in materials management function of an Indian petroleum refinery through business process re-engineering (BPR) by analysing current processes, identifying key issues, deriving paradigm shifts and developing re-engineered processes through customer value analysis. BPR has been carried out on existing processes of “materials planning and procurement” and “warehousing and surplus disposal”. The re-engineered processes for materials management function trigger a few improvement projects that were identified by the group of executives who took part in the re-engineering exercise. Those projects were implemented in an integrated framework with the application of the state of art information technology tools.