Sydney eScholarship
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The biology, ecology, and taxonomy of sea urchins in the subtropical biogeographic transition zone of southeast Australia
No full textOcean warming is driving the global redistribution of marine ectothermic taxa to higher latitudes and
the ecotone between tropical and temperate realms is likely to be at the forefront of this redistribution.
In marine ecosystems, herbivory is a significant ecological process, regulating ecosystems through
grazing, and sea urchins are among the most important herbivorous taxa across latitudes on tropical
coral reefs, temperate rocky reefs and in seagrass meadows. This thesis focusses on how ocean
warming will affect sea urchins in the subtropical biogeographic transition zone of eastern Australia,
and I aimed to fill knowledge gaps regarding the taxonomy, ecology and biology of echinoids in this
unique ecosystem
Designing for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A Phenomenographic Study of Course Leaders’ Experiences
No full textInterdisciplinarity has become a core aim of many universities, resulting in the expansion of
interdisciplinary courses that prepare students to live and work in a world marked by increasing
complexity, uncertainty, and rapid technological advancement. However, there remains limited clarity
and agreement on the meanings, purposes, and practices of interdisciplinary education. This thesis
identifies and maps out the variation in the understandings, conceptions, and experiences of
designing for interdisciplinary teaching and of 23 course leaders—academics who made substantial
intellectual contributions to the conceptualisation, creation, design, redesign, or enactment of
interdisciplinary courses.
The thesis investigates: (1) how course leaders understand interdisciplinarity, (2) how they conceive
of its purpose in interdisciplinary education, (3) how they approach interdisciplinary teaching and
learning in their course designs, (4) how they experience educational design processes, and (5) how
they experience their institutional environment when developing and sustaining interdisciplinary
courses. Together the outcomes contribute in ways that synthesising individual accounts of practice
synthesis approaches cannot, showing the relationships between course leaders’ different ways of
experiencing.
The thesis shows that designing for interdisciplinary teaching and learning was experienced as
collaborative, knowledge-centred, characterised by ongoing learning, plural, situated, and
challenging. These outcomes highlight the importance of informal collegial networks, research on
design practices, and conceptualising design work as knowledge work. It further discusses the
potential of interdisciplinary design practices to contribute to disciplinary education and to shape their
institutional environments. This thesis can be of use to interdisciplinary course leaders and others
responsible for creating and sustaining interdisciplinary courses and programmes in universities
"Truely there is no good music without queer people": A Narrative-Based Inquiry into the Inclusivity of Queerness in the Modern Australian Music Classroom
No full textThis narrative multi-case study examines how queer content and identities are
incorporated into teaching practices to foster inclusive, visible, and safe environments for
both educators and their students. Drawing from the narratives of three, queer identifying
Australian music teachers, the research delves into the systematic, cultural, and institutional
barriers they face, alongside their strategies to navigate heteronormative schooling systems.
The findings underscore the significance of queer representation in music education,
highlighting its impact on students’ and teachers’ identity formation, emotional well-being,
and societal positioning. Additionally, the study evaluates the role of music as a
transformative space that enables discussion, creation and acceptance. Through employing
a queer research paradigm, this work situates itself within critical discourse and advocates
for changes in music education policy and practice. Recommendations include integrating
queer pedagogy into teacher education programs, queer content into the music curriculum
and establishing more robust protections for queer teachers. This aims to address gaps in
Australian queer music education scholarship and endeavours to influence more inclusive
practices in music classrooms nationwide
A Web of Nets: How Everything is a Network
No full textA Web of Nets, edited by David M. Levinson and Somwrita Sarkar explores the profound influence and universal relevance of networks, from physical systems to abstract constructs, connecting diverse fields and phenomena. Whether natural or man-made, these interconnected systems shape our understanding of science, technology, and culture.
Structured into comprehensive sections, the book navigates through network principles, theories, and applications:
Principles and Theory: Understand the foundational aspects of network science, including graph theory, topology, and network formation. Key concepts such as accessibility, resilience, and scaling reveal the hidden patterns underlying complex systems.
Applications Across Domains:
Biological Systems: Explore the networks within cells, organs, and ecosystems, revealing their interconnectedness and impact on life processes.
Physical Systems: Delve into the cosmic web, chemical reactions, and transport systems, where networks determine flows, capacities, and dynamics.
Technological Innovations: Learn about advancements in computing, communication, and infrastructure, illustrating how networks enable modern life.
Social and Cultural Networks: Unpack the structure of social interactions, cultural exchanges, and economic markets, showing how they shape societies.
Analysis and Evolution: Examine methods to analyze connectivity, centrality, and flow within networks, and understand their evolution over time. Techniques like PageRank, space syntax, and feedback loops provide powerful tools to decode network behavior.
Emergent Phenomena: Discover how networks give rise to self-organization, emergent behaviors, and innovation. Case studies range from neural circuits and the brain's connectome to the assembly line and supply chains.
Blending theoretical insights with practical applications, A Web of Nets is both a comprehensive reference and a thought-provoking exploration. It bridges disciplines, fostering a deeper appreciation of the patterns connecting the natural, physical, and human worlds.
Engage with this captivating analysis to unlock a greater understanding of the networks shaping our universe
Australian tidal wetlands and their response to sea-level rise
No full textThis thesis examines the dynamics, trophic relationships, and climate change responses of mangrove and saltmarsh ecosystems through five interconnected themes, spanning over two decades of research from local to global scales. The work provides the first comprehensive treatment of Australian saltmarsh biogeography and demonstrates regional-scale mangrove encroachment into saltmarsh areas across four continents, linking this phenomenon to global climate change drivers. The research establishes that mangrove expansion in temperate regions is limited by dispersal barriers rather than physiological constraints. Through innovative use of stable isotopes and detailed surveys, the research reveals crucial trophic dynamics, demonstrating the importance of saltmarsh in supporting estuarine food webs. Key findings include the synchronization of crustacean and mollusc spawning with spring tides, creating unique feeding opportunities for commercially important fish species. This work provides the first detailed assessment of fish utilization patterns in temperate Australian saltmarshes. Analysis of the first Australian network of Surface Elevation Table-Marker Horizon stations, expanded to 289 installations, reveals critical thresholds in mangrove response to sea-level rise. Global synthesis of 478 monitoring stations demonstrates that while sediment accretion often keeps pace with sea-level rise, subsidence prevents surface elevation from maintaining equilibrium. The research pioneers the application of stable isotopes to determine carbon provenance in tidal wetlands, demonstrating the influence of geomorphic setting on carbon accumulation and revealing that moderate sea-level rise can enhance carbon sequestration. Novel long-term studies of biomass change provide some of the highest estimates of carbon accumulation in the literature. These scientific insights inform new management frameworks, demonstrating vulnerability thresholds under warming scenarios and developing predictive models for vegetation dynamics and carbon accumulation. The work has directly influenced policy developments, including the listing of coastal saltmarsh as an endangered ecological community and the development of emission abatement frameworks
RPA Virtual Hospital Economic Evaluation Report
No full textThis report evaluates the value of rpavirtual from an economic perspective. Five non-pandemic related virtual
care services provided by rpavirtual were assessed:
• acute hospital care substitution (Virtual Trauma);
• subacute care substitution (Virtual Rehabilitation);
• improving integration (Emergency Department to Community).
• emergency department substitution (Virtual Urgent Care and Emergency Department); and
• outpatient specialist care substitution (Virtual Fracture)
A detailed streamflow and groundwater salinity dataset for Muttama Creek Catchment, NSW, Australia
No full textDryland salinity remains a major natural resource management concern, specifcially in Australia, but also globally. However, a lack of detailed space-time data sets with observations of stream and groundwater salinity has limited further understanding of the range of processes that can lead to dryland salinity problems in landscapes. The aim of this study is to report on the open data available as a result of a 10-year data collection effort in a subcatchment of the Murrumbidgee catchment in New South Wales, Australia.
Over a 10 year period a series of different sampling campaigns has resulted in a large dataset with hydrogeochemical data which includes both in-situ (field) data and post laboratory analysis of major anions and cations. The data set covers 23 groundwater sample sites and 37 surface water sites. Because the data was collected by four distinct groups and over many years we analyse if this has caused a bias in the dataset. In addition we show the major spatial and temporal trends to provide an overview of the dataset and analyse any posible biases.
The dataset is made open access to encourage further research and the basic description already shows the richness of the collected data and opportunities for further research.
The associated paper is submitted to Earth System Science Data: https://www.earth-system-science-data.net/Described in the paper Vervoort et al. A detailed streamflow and groundwater salinity dataset for Muttama Creek Catchment, NSW, Australia, submitted to ESSD (https://www.earth-system-science-data.net/
Multimodality Integration for Natural Language Generation
No full textMultimodal Natural Language Processing integrates text processing with other data modalities like image, video, audio and speech. Recently, developing models capable of generating human-like language conditioned on multimodal data has been a growing research area. In this thesis, I focus on two Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks: 1) Visual Storytelling (VST) which requires a model to produce a matching story given an image sequence, and 2) Video Paragraph Captioning (VPC) where given a video prompt, a coherent textual summary describing key events in the video needs to be generated. To understand these image and video modalities, many models utilise pretrained networks to convert the raw data into an embedding stream which is then fed into a sequence-to-sequence model to decode the text. However, this fails to explicitly capture relations between important aspects such as interactions between multimodal features or temporal relationships between key events. Thus, how to best represent this complex multimodal data is an ongoing challenge. Moreover, another challenge is that models tend to lack commonsense and reasoning ability due to only being exposed to limited training data. Consequently, models become incapable of producing outputs that go beyond the pattern recognised in the data.
Therefore, to address these challenges, this research explores methods for transforming the image and video input into high-level semantic commonsense-enhanced graphs to promote scene and context understanding. Furthermore, for evaluation, due to the lack of metrics designed for VST, my thesis additionally proposes a novel reference-free metric which takes into account the fact that storytelling is subjective in nature.
As the final proposed work, a multimodal commonsense knowledge graph focusing on social and event-based knowledge is introduced. It is hoped that such multimodal commonsense knowledge can be used as auxiliary information to help improve NLG tasks like VST and VPC
Remembering resistance: Traversing the memoryscape of Sydney’s green bans movement
No full textFrom 1971 to 1974, the ‘green bans movement’ captured Sydney’s attention, for its novel coalitions holding up development for social, ecological or heritage reasons. The historical period has become part of a narrative that Sydney likes to tell about itself, told and retold everywhere from state funerals to union trainings. Cultural memory emerges in plaques, murals, buildings, place names across the city, and in films and stories, depicting the city. How does cultural memory structure our understanding of Sydney’s 1970s green bans? Memory can seal off the past or mobilise it in pursuit of a different future
Oral Health Research Connect - December 2025 - Guest Speakers: Prof Yin Xiao and Dr Eduardo Delamare
No full textThe Oral Health Research Connect (OHRC) seminar series, organised by the Sydney Dental School, aims to foster a culture of research across the school, it’s partner Local Health Districts and other oral health stakeholders.
The OHRC will achieve this through engagement and collaboration in a respectful, safe, constructive and positive discussion. It will be a research capacity and capability development opportunity for students, academics and clinicians. It will serve as a nexus for idea generation and research translation.
Our Guest Speakers & Presentation Topic
• Regenerative Dentistry: Opportunities and Challenges- Prof Yin Xiao
Regenerative dentistry is an emerging field that applies principles of tissue engineering, stem cell biology, biomaterials science, and molecular biology to restore the structure and function of dental and oral tissues lost to disease, trauma, or congenital anomalies. It aims to go beyond traditional restorative approaches by promoting biological regeneration rather than synthetic replacement. While regenerative dentistry holds great promise, challenges remain in translating benchside innovations to routine clinical practice. These include Ensuring long-term safety and efficacy of stem cell-based therapies; Standardizing manufacturing of scaffolds and biologics under GMP conditions; Navigating regulatory pathways for advanced therapeutic medicinal products (ATMPs; Achieving predictable clinical outcomes in complex oral environments.
Despite these challenges, regenerative dentistry represents the future of oral health care, with the potential to revolutionize the management of dental diseases by enabling biologically driven restoration and tissue renewal.
• Applications of Rule-Based Reasoning Strategies to Address Limitations of AI Systems in DMFR-Dr Eduardo Delamare
Dr Delamare will present a segment of his PhD research discussing innovative strategies to overcome the interpretability and explainability limitations of AI-based tools when used in diagnostic tasks across dental applications. By incorporating classic surface mapping tools into AI-based segmentations, these systems intend to offer higher reliability and facilitate adoption in clinical practice. The discussion will delve into specific methodologies that integrate traditional diagnostic techniques with cutting-edge AI algorithms to enhance accuracy and clinician confidence.
Participants will gain insights into case studies demonstrating the practical application of these strategies, highlighting improvements in diagnostic precision. Furthermore, the session will address challenges faced during implementation and provide guidelines for effective integration of these AI-enhanced tools into routine dental workflows, aiming to bridge the gap between technology development and real-world clinical utility