Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

The parent?infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self

Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subjectivity with a constructionist model based on the assumption of an innate contingency detector which orients the infant towards aspects of the social world that react congruently and in a specifically cued informative manner that expresses and facilitates the assimilation of cultural knowledge. Research on the neural mechanisms associated with mentalisation and social influences on its development are reviewed. It is suggested that the infant focuses on the attachment figure as a source of reliable information about the world. The construction of the sense of a subjective self is then an aspect of acquiring knowledge about the world through the caregiver's pedagogical communicative displays which in this context focuses on the child's thoughts and feelings. We argue that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings

The importance of fine-scale savanna heterogeneity for reptiles and small mammals

Tropical savannas are an important reservoir of global biodiversity. Australia's extensive savannas, although still largely intact, are experiencing substantial declines in terrestrial biodiversity due to a variety of interrelated effects of altered fire regimes, grazing and increases in invasive species. These disturbance processes are spatially variable, combine to increase landscape to local-scale landscape heterogeneity, but rarely result in well-defined patch boundaries. We quantified the importance of this heterogeneity for native reptile and small mammal species in a tropical savanna landscape of Queensland, Australia. We used high resolution remote sensing imagery (IKONOS) to map habitat pattern at a 4. m spatial resolution and at variable extents. We found that landscapes dominated by grass or bare ground had low reptile and small mammal diversity, while landscapes with a heterogeneous mix of grass, bare ground and trees had high species diversity and relative abundance of most species. Landscape heterogeneity may increase reptile and small mammal species richness by: (i) increasing the variety and abundance of foraging resources such as seeds and invertebrates; (ii) providing cover from predators and high summer temperatures; and (iii) increasing functional connectivity and dispersal success. The importance of these resources and processes varies among individual species and at different spatial scales, reiterating the need to consider habitat requirements of multiple species in landscape management and conservation planning. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

Climate change and land clearing: A short note

The article offers information on climate change as a multi-dimensional issue where forces affect climate system. It states that the modification and conversions of terrestrial ecosystems through human land use is acknowledged as second order that force behind climate changes. Modelling studies have significant implications for native vegetation and Natural Resource Management in Australia

The consequences of using indirect signs that decay to determine species' occupancy

Statistical models of species' distributions rely on data on species' occupancy, or use, of sites across space and/or time. For rare or cryptic species, indirect signs, such as dung, may be the only realistic means of determining their occupancy status across broad spatial extents. However, the consequences of sign decay for errors in estimates of occupancy have not previously been considered. If signs decay very rapidly, then false-negative errors may occur because signs at an occupied site have decayed by the time it is surveyed. On the other hand, if signs decay very slowly, false-positive errors may occur because signs remain present at sites that are no longer occupied. We addressed this issue by quantifying, as functions of sign decay and accumulation rates: 1) the false-negative error rate due to sign decay and, 2) the expected time interval prior to a survey within which signs indicate the species was present; as this time interval increases, false-positives become more likely. We then applied this to the specific example of koala Phascolarctos cinereus occupancy derived from faecal pellet surveys using data on faecal pellet decay rates. We show that there is a clear trade-off between false-negative error rates and the potential for false-positive errors. For the koala case study, false-negative errors were low on average and the expected time interval prior to surveys that detected pellets indicate the species was present within less than 2-3 yr. However, these quantities showed quite substantial spatial variation that could lead to biased parameter estimates for distribution models based on faecal pellet surveys. This highlights the importance of observation errors arising from sign decay and we suggest some modifications to existing methods to deal with this issue

The importance of ecological scale for wildlife conservation in naturally fragmented environments: A case study of the brush-tailed rock-wallaby (Petrogale penicillata)

Determining the ecologically relevant spatial scales for predicting species occurrences is an important concept when determining species–environment relationships. Therefore species distribution modelling should consider all ecologically relevant spatial scales. While several recent studies have addressed this problem in artificially fragmented landscapes,few studies have researched relevant ecological scales for organisms that also live in naturally fragmented landscapes. This situation is exemplified by the Australian rock-wallabies’ preference for rugged terrain and we addressed the issue of scale using the threatened brush-tailed rock-wallaby (Petrogale penicillata) in eastern Australia. We surveyed for brush-tailed rock-wallabies at 200 sites in southeast Queensland, collecting potentially influential site level and landscape level variables. We applied classification trees at either scale to capture a hierarchy of relationships between the explanatory variables and brush-tailed rock-wallaby presence/absence. Habitat complexity at the site level and geology at the landscape level were the best predictors of where we observed brushtailed rock-wallabies. Our study showed that the distribution of the species is affected by both site scale and landscape scale factors, reinforcing the need for a multi-scale approach to understanding the relationship between a species and its environment.We demonstrate that careful design of data collection, using coarse scale spatial datasets and finer scale field data, can provide useful information for identifying the ecologically relevant scales for studying species-environment relationships. Our study highlights the need to determine patterns of environmental influence at multiple scales to conserve specialist species such as the brush-tailed rock-wallaby in naturally fragmented landscapes

Out on a limb: habitat use of a specialist folivore, the koala, at the edge of its range in a modified semi-arid landscape

Habitat loss and natural catastrophes reduce the resources available to animals. Species can persist if they have access to additional resources and habitats through the processes of landscape complementation and supplementation. In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, where productivity is limited by precipitation, the impact of landscape change and prolonged drought is severe on specialist species whose range boundaries are limited by aridity. We examined the pattern of occurrence by a specialist arboreal folivore, the koala, at the periphery of its biogeographic range, in a semi-arid rangeland landscape. We used hierarchical mixed modelling to examine the effect of landscape change on koala populations and their habitat use during and after a prolonged drought. We found that the tree species and the distance of a site from water courses were the most important determinants for koala presence in these landscapes. Koalas were predominantly detected in riverine habitat along the water courses, which are primary habitat and provide refugia in times of drought and extreme heat. There was a strong positive effect from the interaction between the amount of primary and secondary habitat in the landscape, although individually, the amount of each of these habitats was not important. This shows koalas will persist in more intact landscapes. There was no difference in habitat use between dry and wet years, but we consider that it can take several wet seasons for koalas to expand into habitats away from water courses