Avoiding Costly Conservation Mistakes: The Importance of Defining Actions and Costs in Spatial Priority Setting

Background: The typical mandate in conservation planning is to identify areas that represent biodiversity targets within the smallest possible area of land or sea, despite the fact that area may be a poor surrogate for the cost of many conservation actions. It is also common for priorities for conservation investment to be identified without regard to the particular conservation action that will be implemented. This demonstrates inadequate problem specification and may lead to inefficiency: the cost of alternative conservation actions can differ throughout a landscape, and may result in dissimilar conservation priorities

‘Great markers of culture’: The Australian sport field

In Creative Nation, sport is distinguished by its almost complete absence, except as a competitor for sponsorship with ‘cultural organisations’, and in brief mentions as content for SBS Radio and Aboriginal community radio stations. Sport is not mentioned at all in the 2011 National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, but in the ensuing policy, Creative Australia, is treated, with art and religion, as one of the ‘great markers of culture’ in which, distinctively, elite professionalism, amateurism and fandom/appreciation happily co-exist. This article reflects on developments in the Australian sport field over the last two decades, highlighting the management of elite-grass roots and public–private funding tensions, and relevant parallels in the arts field. It addresses the pivotal relationship between the sport and broadcast media fields, arguing that sport, as a Bourdieusian ‘field of struggles’, is an under-appreciated domain of national cultural policy in which different forms of capital collide and converge

Optimising Treatment Outcomes for Children and Adults Through Rapid Genome Sequencing of Sepsis Pathogens. A Study Protocol for a Prospective, Multi-Centre Trial (DIRECT)

Background: Sepsis contributes significantly to morbidity and mortality globally. In Australia, 20,000 develop sepsis every year, resulting in 5,000 deaths, and more than AUD$846 million in expenditure. Prompt, appropriate antibiotic therapy is effective in improving outcomes in sepsis. Conventional culture-based methods to identify appropriate therapy have limited yield and take days to complete. Recently, nanopore technology has enabled rapid sequencing with real-time analysis of pathogen DNA. We set out to demonstrate the feasibility and diagnostic accuracy of pathogen sequencing direct from clinical samples, and estimate the impact of this approach on time to effective therapy when integrated with personalised software-guided antimicrobial dosing in children and adults on ICU with sepsis. Methods: The DIRECT study is a pilot prospective, non-randomized multicentre trial of an integrated diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm combining rapid direct pathogen sequencing and software-guided, personalised antibiotic dosing in children and adults with sepsis on ICU. Participants and interventions: DIRECT will collect microbiological and pharmacokinetic samples from approximately 200 children and adults with sepsis admitted to one of four ICUs in Brisbane. In Phase 1, we will evaluate Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION sequencing direct from blood in 50 blood culture-proven sepsis patients recruited from consecutive patients with suspected sepsis. In Phase 2, a further 50 consecutive patients with suspected sepsis will be recruited in whom MinION sequencing will be combined with Bayesian software-guided (ID-ODS) personalised antimicrobial dosing. Outcome measures: The primary outcome is time to effective antimicrobial therapy, defined as trough drug concentrations above the MIC of the pathogen. Secondary outcomes are diagnostic accuracy of MinION sequencing from whole blood, time to pathogen identification and susceptibility testing using sequencing direct from whole blood and from positive blood culture broth. Discussion: Rapid pathogen sequencing coupled with antimicrobial dosing software has great potential to overcome the limitations of conventional diagnostics which often result in prolonged inappropriate antimicrobial therapy. Reduced time to optimal antimicrobial therapy may reduce sepsis mortality and ICU length of stay. This pilot study will yield key feasibility data to inform further, urgently needed sepsis studies. Phase 2 of the trial protocol is registered with the ANZCTR (ACTRN12620001122943). Trial registration: Registered with the Australia New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry Number ACTRN12620001122943

Mining and (sustainable) local communities: Transforming Ravensthorpe, Western Australia

This chapter examines local community experiences, understandings and changes attending the presence of mining activity, in particular as occurred in the Shire of Ravensthorpe in the South West of Western Australia (WA). It does so by drawing on an extensive ethnographic study spanning the development, opening, and closure of BHP Billiton’s Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation (RNO). Given that the negative consequences of mining activity are most evident and complex at the local level, it is crucial that we understand and address how communities (and the individuals and families who are both part of and are shaped by communities) experience the impacts of mining. Though difficult to measure, social and cultural dimensions of mining at the local scale, as this chapter demonstrates, are central to our understanding of mining as a curse or cure

Using Market-Based Instruments to Enhance Climate Resilience

Each chapter will address one specific sub-theme out of the population of themes covered in the Major Reference Work: Water, Energy, Agriculture and Food Built environment and Infrastructure, Transport, Human health, Society, and Disaster