Effects of Coastal Recreation on Social Aspects of Human Well-being

Coastal ecosystems are under increasing pressures from a wide variety of human impacts. As the coastal zone provides many goods and services essential to the well-being of people, there is potential for changes in the condition of coastal ecosystems to have reciprocal impacts on the human population. Based on existing literature, it was hypothesised that changes in coastal ecosystem condition could affect aspects of social and community relations through affecting residents' coastal recreational activities, sense of place, social interactions and networks, health and overall quality of life. These relationships were investigated in the Pumicestone catchment in south-east Queensland with the aim of identifying the interactions between coastal condition and human well-being. Information on key variables was collected by surveying catchment residents, and data were analysed using path analysis. The results indicate that the recreation in coastal areas can impact on the well-being of coastal residents. Understanding the positive relationship between ecosystems and human well-being can potentially reduce the apparent conflict between environmental improvement and human interests, thus improving management of local ecosystems

Assessing the Social and Economic Impacts of Changes in Coastal Systems

Humans have wide ranging impacts on many of the world's ecosystems. Understanding the contribution of ecosystems to human well-being is an important part of improving management of these systems. Current methods to value ecosystems rely on economic techniques that do not adequately reflect contributions of ecosystems to all aspects of human well-being and do not incorporate objectives such as ecological sustainability or fairness. It is proposed therefore that a dynamic model demonstrating the contributions of ecosystems to specific aspects of well-being, such as health, economic production, employment, recreation and social interaction, would be a useful tool in informing and improving environmental management and decision making. This model would be valuable as it could include multiple objectives, be used to make quantitative predictions of impacts, and could be used in parallel with existing valuation and decision making techniques. The need for this type of model, and an outline of the model proposed are presented in this paper

Evolutionary techniques for sensor networks energy optimization in marine environmental monitoring

The sustainable management of coastal and offshore ecosystems, such as for example coral reef environments, requires the collection of accurate data across various temporal and spatial scales. Accordingly, monitoring systems are seen as central tools for ecosystem-based environmental management, helping on one hand to accurately describe the water column and substrate biophysical properties, and on the other hand to correctly steer sustainability policies by providing timely and useful information to decision-makers. A robust and intelligent sensor network that can adjust and be adapted to different and changing environmental or management demands would revolutionize our capacity to wove accurately model, predict, and manage human impacts on our coastal, marine, and other similar environments. In this paper advanced evolutionary techniques are applied to optimize the design of an innovative energy harvesting device for marine applications. The authors implement an enhanced technique in order to exploit in the most effective way the uniqueness and peculiarities of two classical optimization approaches, Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms. Here, this hybrid procedure is applied to a power buoy designed for marine environmental monitoring applications in order to optimize the recovered energy from sea-wave, by selecting the optimal device configuration

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

The avifauna of Trainor and Pantar, Lesser Sundas, Indonesia

Volume: 28Start Page: 77End Page: 9

Ciguatera fish poisoning in the Pacific Islands (1998 - 2008)

Background: Ciguatera is a type of fish poisoning that occurs throughout the tropics, particularly in vulnerable island communities such as the developing Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs). After consuming ciguatoxin-contaminated fish, people report a range of acute neurologic, gastrointestinal, and cardiac symptoms, with some experiencing chronic neurologic symptoms lasting weeks to months. Unfortunately, the true extent of illness and its impact on human communities and ecosystem health are still poorly understood