University of the Sunshine Coast
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Population modelling and genetics of a critically endangered Madagascan palm Tahina spectabilis
No full textMadagascar is home to 208 indigenous palm species, almost all of them endemic and >80% of which are endangered. We undertook complete population census and sampling for genetic analysis of a relatively recently discovered giant fan palm, the Critically Endangered Tahina spectablis in 2008 and 2016. Our 2016 study included newly discovered populations and added to our genetic study. We incorporated these new populations into species distribution niche model (SDM) and projected these onto maps of the region. We developed population matrix models based on observed demographic data to model population change and predict the species vulnerability to extinction by undertaking population viability analysis (PVA). We investigated the potential conservation value of reintroduced planted populations within the species potential suitable habitat. We found that the population studied in 2008 had grown in size due to seedling regeneration but had declined in the number of reproductively mature plants, and we were able to estimate that the species reproduces and dies after approximately 70 years. Our models suggest that if the habitat where it resides continues to be protected the species is unlikely to go extinct due to inherent population decline and that it will likely experience significant population growth after approximately 80 years due to the reproductive and life cycle attributes of the species. The newly discovered populations contain more genetic diversity than the first discovered southern population which is genetically depauperate. The species appears to demonstrate a pattern of dispersal leading to isolated founder plants which may eventually lead to population development depending on local establishment opportunities. The conservation efforts currently put in place including the reintroduction of plants within the species potential suitable habitat if maintained are thought likely to enable the species to sustain itself but it remains vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts
Feminist Live Art in Aotearoa New Zealand: Bound and Unbound Tensions in the Work of Julia Croft, Virginia Frankovich, and Nisha Madhan
No full textThis article explores three performance works by Julia Croft, Nisha Madhan, and Virginia Frankovich. They are leading examples of feminist live art in Aotearoa New Zealand and one of the aims of this article is to record and discuss some of their ephemeral performance work—this is a feminist act within itself. The works discussed are If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming, performed by Croft and directed by Frankovich; Power Ballad, again performed by Croft but directed by Madhan; and Medusa, created and performed by all three artists. These works have many similarities, namely that they all contain powerful imagery and often communicate visually rather than through text. However, the subject matter of each work addresses different themes: the unpacking and dissecting of the mediatised image of women; struggling against the systemic hold of language; and viscerally demonstrating a monstrous yet beautiful rage against the power structures that are all around us. The work of Croft, Frankovich and Madhan is fluid, constantly evolving, and perhaps could be looked to as an example of Southern feminist performance
Clustering biomedical and gene expression datasets with kernel density and unique neighborhood set based vein detection
No full textIt is a crucial need for a clustering technique to produce high-quality clusters from biomedical and gene expression datasets without requiring any user inputs. Therefore, in this paper we present a clustering technique called KUVClust that produces high-quality clusters when applied on biomedical and gene expression datasets without requiring any user inputs. The KUVClust algorithm uses three concepts namely multivariate kernel density estimation, unique closest neighborhood set and vein-based clustering. Although these concepts are known in the literature, KUVClust combines the concepts in a novel manner to achieve high-quality clustering results. The performance of KUVClust is compared with established clustering techniques on real-world biomedical and gene expression datasets. The comparisons were evaluated in terms of three criteria (purity, entropy, and sum of squared error (SSE)). Experimental results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed technique over the existing techniques for clustering both the low dimensional biomedical and high dimensional gene expressions datasets used in the experiments
Future Pathways for Disaster Justice
No full textThis book explores policy, legal, and practice implications regarding the emerging field of disaster justice, using case studies of floods, bushfires, heatwaves, and earthquakes in Australia and Southern and South-east Asia. It reveals geographic locational and social disadvantage and structural inequities that lead to increased risk and vulnerability to disaster, and which impact ability to recover post-disaster. Written by multidisciplinary disaster researchers, the book addresses all stages of the disaster management cycle, demonstrating or recommending just approaches to preparation, response and recovery. It notably reveals how procedural, distributional and interactional aspects of justice enhance resilience, and offers a cutting edge analysis of disaster justice for managers, policy makers, researchers in justice, climate change or emergency management. [Book Synopsos
Beyond a tragic fire season: a window of opportunity to address climate change?
No full textNo abstract available
Schooling and poverty: re-thinking impact, research and social justice
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on poverty, schooling and research and to tease out and discuss some of the concepts that this kind of writing and research work provokes. We frame the issue, briefly introduce each paper and then discuss “keywords” in four sections: living/knowledge, justice/connection, weakness/education, and affect/anxiety
A Moving Female Frontier: Aboriginal Exemption and Domestic Service in Queensland, 1897–1914
No full textInspired by new histories of Indigenous mobility that emphasise how movement was an important feature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience, this article examines how mobility enables us to better understand the legal status of exemption. It shows the way non-Indigenous families seized on exemption in Queensland between 1897 and 1914 as a way to maintain control over the movement of the women and girls who worked for them as domestic servants. It also examines how those women and girls negotiated, refused and embraced the policy of exemption and used it to gain freedom to move around Queensland, driven by their family connections, ambitions and cultural and community ties. These two different uses of exemption show that even though the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act made the movement of Indigenous people fraught, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continued their efforts to be mobile
A coal elimination treaty 2030: Fast tracking climate change mitigation, global health and security
No full textThis article sets out the case for an international treaty to phase out the mining and burning of coal—a Coal Elimination Treaty, or CET—by 2030, as a way of addressing multiple weaknesses in the global climate change regime and as a medium-term success towards arresting average global heating at 1.5°C before 2050. Given the growing risk that the Paris agreement will fail to trigger rapid emissions reduction, we propose the CET as a global “supply-side” mechanism, and as a way of empowering climate-vulnerable and high-ambition states. We make an integrated environmental, public health and security case for a CET, specify its design principles, and propose three negotiation pathways, including a normative model inspired by the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; one that would progressively stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate coal so as to prevent a dire and unmanageable climatic future