Open Research Exeter - University of Exeter
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Warming Climates, Fewer Bats? Assessing Future Risks to Pest Suppression Services
No full textClimate change poses significant threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services, including bat-mediated pest suppression. This study aims to assess how temperature and precipitation changes may affect bat populations and their role in suppressing pine processionary moth (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) in Serra da Estrela, Portugal. We identified the Top-7 bat species with >10% pine processionary moth occurrences in their diet, using faecal DNA metabarcoding. Climate model projections (SSP245 and SSP585) were then used to assess impacts on these species and their pest suppression services. We analysed temperature and precipitation anomalies for 2041–2060, 2061– 2080 and 2081–2100 to identify areas and species most exposed to climate stress. Our results show that under SSP585, rising temperatures could lead to a complete loss of sites providing bat-mediated pest suppression and associated species richness by 2081–2100, while the worst-case precipitation scenario (SSP585) projects a coverage reduction of up to 87 % by 2061–2080, with a potential total loss of suitable habitat by 2081–2100, highlighting severe local declines in service provision. Riparian and diverse-vegetation zones with high climate anomalies are critical for sustaining bat populations and their pest-suppression capacity. These findings emphasise the urgency of incorporating climate change into conservation planning and adaptive pest-management policies, providing evidence-based guidance for biodiversity conservation as well as forest and agricultural management strategies.</p
Opaque Negotiations. A practice-based enquiry into the impact of fictional interventions on the relationship between directors and participants of hybrid documentaries
No full textRemoved whilst thesis is under Embargo</p
Anonymised qualitative interview excerpts underpinning Phase 2 of the RecoverED programme theory development process
No full textThis dataset is associated with the publication Developing a programme theory of a complex, home-based rehabilitation intervention for recovery after an episode of delirium (PLOS ONE, accepted).The publication reports the process of developing and refining a programme theory underpinning RecoverED, a novel, home-based, multicomponent rehabilitation intervention designed to support recovery following an episode of delirium in older adults. The paper focuses on the methodological process and synthesis of evidence and does not report primary qualitative findings in detail.The dataset shared here comprises anonymised qualitative interview excerpts from Phase 2 of the programme theory development process. Phase 2 involved semi-structured qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, including older adults with lived experience of delirium, family carers, and healthcare professionals. These interviews were conducted to explore experiences of delirium and recovery, perceived support needs, and views on intervention components, mechanisms, and delivery.The interview data were used to inform, refine, and substantiate the developing programme theory, contributing to the identification of key intervention components, hypothesised mechanisms of action, and contextual factors. The excerpts provided represent the minimal qualitative dataset underpinning the analytic interpretations presented in the paper and are shared to support transparency, reproducibility, and reuse.All data have been fully anonymised in accordance with ethical approvals and participant consent. The dataset contains coded interview excerpts linked to analytic themes and does not include full interview transcripts.</p
Modelling dust coagulation, dynamical drag and turbulent mixing during star and disc formation
No full textPlanet formation in the discs around young stars involves the coagulation of sub-micron sized dust grains into much larger grains that may be mixed by turbulence and migrate through the disc. In this paper, we describe how we have combined a method for modelling the coagulation of a population of dust grains with the multigrain algorithm for modelling the dynamical evolution of a population of dust grains that are subject to strong gas drag. We solve the dynamical evolution of the dust grains due to gas drag using a recently-developed implicit integration method, and we introduce a new implicit method to model the diffusion of the dust due to unresolved hydrodynamic turbulence. The resulting smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code allows us, for the first time, to model the growth, mixing and migration of dust grain populations during the early stages of star formation and the formation, growth and evolution of a young protoplanetary disc using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. In doing so, we find that including turbulent dust diffusion within the disc provides a substantial enhancement of the rate of dust grain growth due to the fact that the turbulent diffusion provides a source of small and intermediate dust grains to the regions in which the largest dust grains are growing.</p
Towards transparent AI agents for air traffic control
No full textAdvances in the use of artificial intelligence agents for air traffic control (ATC) have the potential to reshape modern aviation operations. Despite these advances, the adoption of such agents in safety-critical ATC applications remains limited and this is, in part, due to their lack of transparency. The transparency of such agents is crucial for humans to understand why a specific action is advised or to reason about the agent’s behaviour and assess their trustworthiness in real-time. The simpler the agent, the more transparent it can be, but this comes at the cost of flexibility in agent performance. We propose, illustrate, and critically examine mechanisms for providing AI agents for ATC with interpretability and explainability. We focus on agents ranging from simple rule-based systems to optimisation-based and reinforcement-learning agents, and we report initial qualitative feedback from operational ATCOs on prototype explainability mechanisms.</p
Decolonising co-authorship at the interstices of Third and Fourth Cinema: Amussu
No full textAmussu (2019) – ‘movement’ in Tamazight, the language of the indigenous Amazigh people of North Africa – was made by Nadir Bouhmouch in collaboration with the ‘Local Film Committee of Imider,’ 1 part of a small, Tamazight-speaking community of villages in southeast Morocco. The film recounts the Imider’s resistance to the biggest silver mine in Africa, part-owned by the Moroccan royal family. This chapter will analyse how Bouhmouch collaborated with the Local Film Committee of Imider to decolonise form, incorporating indigenous oral traditions into the structure and aesthetic of Amussu’s message of resistance. In so doing, Amussu revives earlier critical and theoretical interventions by Moroccan filmmaker and intellectual Ahmed Bouanani around the place of indigenous culture within the (post-colonial) nation. The film’s focus on pre-colonial, indigenous traditions extends towards new forms of praxis in collaborative documentary filmmaking, whereby the act of theorising in relation to collaborative authorship and Third Cinema as political filmmaking itself forms part of this new approach. Inspired by ‘agraw’ – pre-colonial structures of horizontal, democratic governance originating from within the community – Bouhmouch worked with the Local Film Committee of Imider to apply this form of indigenous, collective decision-making to all stages of the film’s development, production and post-production. A detailed analysis of Amussu’s unique production history and the specific socio-political and cultural context in which it was forged will lead in this chapter to a consideration of what lies in the space between Third and Fourth Cinema and the possibilities (for both film theory and praxis) that this interstitial space offers for decolonising form and engaging in a genuine process of active, collaborative authorship between a non-indigenous filmmaker and an indigenous community in the far south of Morocco.</p
Cooking up Homer: The two lives of Strato, fragment 1 Kassel–Austin
No full textThis article focuses on the only extant fragment of the comic playwright Strato, which is preserved in a third-century BCE papyrus without attribution and in two distinct passages of Athenaeus, where it is ascribed to Strato and Philemon respectively. Athenaeus and the papyrus preserve two different versions of the fragment. Based on a new reconstruction of the papyrus version, this article reassesses the relationship between the two versions, arguing that they reflect different stages of Homeric reception.</p
Kicking politics: How football fan communities became arenas for political influence
No full textThis paper investigates how political campaigns engaged UK football fan communities on Twitter in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum (2016–2017). Football fandom, with its strong collective identities and tribal behaviours, offers fertile ground for political influence. Combining social network and content analysis, we examine how political discourse became embedded in football conversations. We show that a wide range of actors—including parties, media, activist groups, and pseudonymous influencers—mobilised support, provoked reactions, and shaped opinion within these communities. Through case studies of hashtag hijacking, embedded activism, and political “megaphones,” we illustrate how campaigns leveraged fan cultures to amplify political messages. Our findings highlight mechanisms of political influence in ostensibly non-political online spaces and point toward the development of a broader framework in future work.</p
An online forecasting-based fine-tuning pipeline for time-series anomaly prediction
No full textTime-series anomaly detection is critical for numerous real-world applications and has been extensively studied. However, existing methods are typically designed to identify anomalies within a complete time series. In other words, they rely on access to ground truth data to calculate anomaly scores and distinguish anomalous data from normal patterns. This reliance limits their applicability in scenarios where predicting future anomalies is required, as the ground truth is inherently unavailable. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of Time-Series Anomaly Prediction (TSAP), which focuses on forecasting the occurrence and progression of anomalies in time series simultaneously without relying on ground truth. In this paper, we propose a novel exemplar-based pre-training and fine-tuning pipeline tailored to this task, based on recent achievements in online time-series forecasting techniques. The pipeline begins with an offline pre-training phase, where a deep learning model is trained to capture the underlying temporal correlations in time-series data. During the online fine-tuning stage, a three-step process is employed to predict the timing and evolution of anomalies. This process includes prediction and anomaly detection, motif search for similar patterns, and fine-tuning using exemplars. These steps are repeated as new data arrives. We evaluate the proposed method against state-of-the-art approaches from various relevant categories on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves anomaly detection accuracy by up to 53.8% in terms of F1 score and enhances time-series forecasting accuracy during and after anomaly periods by up to 82.4% and 49.1% in terms of MSE. Through analysing the results, we prove the proposed method’s effectiveness in addressing the new TSAP tasks, which are incapable of being handled by current time-series anomaly detection or online time-series forecasting methods.</p
Using novel participatory mapping techniques to identify high leverage points for intervention in the education systems of Eswatini and South Africa
No full textThis study explores transformative intervention and education system change, with the overall aim of making education systems in Eswatini and South Africa more inclusive for marginalised learners. Building on the work of Meadows (1999), the study considers how points of high leverage – information flows, system rules, system self-organisation, system goals, societal mindsets – can be targeted to bring about more meaningful and sustainable change in the education systems of the target countries. A key aim of the study was also to develop a novel methodology for the identification of high leverage points, and to explore stakeholder power dynamics situated at these points.
Grounded in critical realism and relational ontology, the study adopts a systems thinking epistemology, and acknowledges the inherent complexity and interrelatedness of social systems. An exploratory, multiple-phase case study methodology was developed to explore the education system dynamics of the target countries and to identify points of high leverage intervention and the power dynamics situated at those points. This was participatory in nature, guided by the ethical stance of conducting research with people, rather than for people.
Findings in both countries point to the importance of high-leverage system intervention. In particular, intervention at the level of system design (information flows, system rules, self-organisation) was seen to be a way to indirectly target change at the higher leverage point level of system goals and mindsets. Ultimately, mindset shift – especially around disability and marginalisation – was seen as a necessary prerequisite to any meaningful system change, and for the inclusion of marginalised learners. In regard to the novel methodology developed, findings indicated that participants found the multi-stage system mapping exercises to be useful, engaging, and empowering.
This study suggests that participatory system mapping methods can be useful in identifying and targeting high leverage points within education systems. By focussing on the level of system design, and by analysing power dynamics at points of high leverage, the novel methodology developed has the potential to be generalisable and impactful in other fields.</p