Calculation of Timber Yields From North Queensland Rainforests

Calculation of timber yields from north Queensland rainforests indicate that the long term average yield is in the vicinity of 63 000 cubic metres per year, and that an allowable cut of 60 000 cubic metres per year should apply for the period 1986-1991. These calculations apply to the 158 000 hectares of Crown land managed for timber production between Townsville and the Daintree River. Estimates were prepared using cutting cycle analysis, and incorporated a number of innovations made possible by advances in computing technology. These included simulating the growth of individual plots rather than of stratum averages, and the use of a dynamic growth model which accommodated stand density, composition and site quality

Utility of Landsat Thematic Mapper Data for Mapping Site Productivity in Tropical Moist Forests

Regression analysis was used to develop a relationship between Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper data and site quality of permanent sample plots. The thermal band (6) produced misleading results, but the ratio of band 4 on 5 showed promise when combined with geological information. Best results were obtained when regression analysis was restricted to ensure that at least one each of the visible (1 to 3), mid-infrared (5 and 7) and near-infrared (4) bands were included. Results suggest that Landsat TM may be useful for mapping site quality in tropical moist forest in north Queensland. Interpolation of site productivity within a single pass seems feasible, but attempts to extrapolate results to other passes or to imagery obtained on different dates may be unreliable

BUMC Annual Report

Annual report of the Boston University Medical Center

BUMC Annual Report

Annual report of the Boston University Medical Center

Planning for World Heritage: Experiences and Future Directions for Use of Geographical Information Systems

Events leading to the World Heritage listing of north Queensland rainforests and subsequent ban on timber harvesting result from a number of factors including insufficient education of an increasingly articulate and environmentally aware public. Foresters should meet this challenge by renewing efforts to collect reliable information on the multi-resource values of forest areas. GIS has the potential to contribute to this process, particularly when applied as part of a multi-resource decision support system. Source data for multi-resource management could be collected in conjunction with timber inventory, provided additional funding is made available. Use of a GIS as a map overlaying tool can be prone to error unless its users are fully aware of limitations that can arise with this approach. Any multi-resource strategy should be phased into existing timber inventory programmes. Full scale adoption of a multi-resource decision support system in forest services is not likely to occur until the full cost of land use conflicts is included in the cost benefit equation

BUMC Annual Report

Annual report of the Boston University Medical Center

Opening the Black Box of Family-Based Treatments: an artificial intelligence Framework to Examine therapeutic alliance and therapist Empathy

The evidence-based treatment (EBT) movement has primarily focused on core intervention content or treatment fidelity and has largely ignored practitioner skills to manage interpersonal process issues that emerge during treatment, especially with difficult-to-treat adolescents (delinquent, substance-using, medical non-adherence) and those of color. A chief complaint of real world practitioners about manualized treatments is the lack of correspondence between following a manual and managing microsocial interpersonal processes (e.g. negative affect) that arise in treating real world clients. Although family-based EBTs share core similarities (e.g. focus on family interactions, emphasis on practitioner engagement, family involvement), most of these treatments do not have an evidence base regarding common implementation and treatment process problems that practitioners experience in delivering particular models, especially in mid-treatment when demands on families to change their behavior is greatest in treatment - a lack that characterizes the field as a whole. Failure to effectively address common interpersonal processes with difficult-to-treat families likely undermines treatment fidelity and sustained use of EBTs, treatment outcome, and contributes to treatment dropout and treatment nonadherence. Recent advancements in wearables, sensing technologies, multivariate time-series analyses, and machine learning allow scientists to make significant advancements in the study of psychotherapy processes by looking under the skin of the provider-client interpersonal interactions that define therapeutic alliance, empathy, and empathic accuracy, along with the predictive validity of these therapy processes (therapeutic alliance, therapist empathy) to treatment outcome. Moreover, assessment of these processes can be extended to develop procedures for training providers to manage difficult interpersonal processes while maintaining a physiological profile that is consistent with astute skills in psychotherapeutic processes. This paper argues for opening the black box of therapy to advance the science of evidence-based psychotherapy by examining the clinical interior of evidence-based treatments to develop the next generation of audit- and feedback- (i.e., systemic review of professional performance) supervision systems

Sustainable Timber Harvesting: Simulation Studies in the Tropical Rainforests of North Queensland

Although logging ceased in the tropical rainforests of north Queensland following their World Heritage Listing in 1988, they provide a good basis for simulation studies on sustainability of timber harvesting as reliable logging records, inventory and growth data are available. A growth model for these forests has been developed and published. The growth model is dynamic, responding to changes in stand density, composition and management history. A harvesting simulator predicts the trees removed by selection logging, and predicts changes in the residual stand. Simulation studies employ cutting cycle analysis and yield scheduling to demonstrate the sustainability of harvesting. These studies indicate that selection harvesting could sustain a viable timber harvest of about 60 000 m3 year-1. These results are indicative rather than definitive, as the model has not yet been formally validated with independent data

BUMC Annual Report

Annual report of the Boston University Medical Center

Evidence from GC-TRFLP that Bacterial Communities in Soil Are Lognormally Distributed

The Species Abundance Distribution (SAD) is a fundamental property of ecological communities and the form and formation of SADs have been examined for a wide range of communities including those of microorganisms. Progress in understanding microbial SADs, however, has been limited by the remarkable diversity and vast size of microbial communities. As a result, few microbial systems have been sampled with sufficient depth to generate reliable estimates of the community SAD. We have used a novel approach to characterize the SAD of bacterial communities by coupling genomic DNA fractionation with analysis of terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (GC-TRFLP). Examination of a soil microbial community through GC-TRFLP revealed 731 bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that followed a lognormal distribution. To recover the same 731 OTUs through analysis of DNA sequence data is estimated to require analysis of 86,264 16S rRNA sequences. The approach is examined and validated through construction and analysis of simulated microbial communities in silico. Additional simulations performed to assess the potential effects of PCR bias show that biased amplification can cause a community whose distribution follows a power-law function to appear lognormally distributed. We also show that TRFLP analysis, in contrast to GC-TRFLP, is not able to effectively distinguish between competing SAD models. Our analysis supports use of the lognormal as the null distribution for studying the SAD of bacterial communities as for plant and animal communities