Using visual methodology: Social work student's perceptions of practice and the impact on practice educators.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Practice: Social Work in Action on 21-6-18, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2018.1476477Practice learning within social work education plays a significant part in students’ educational journey. Little is understood about the emotional climate of placements. This paper presents a small scale qualitative study of 13 social work students’ perceptions of their relationship with a practice educator (PE) and 6 PE’s perceptions of these emotional experiences. Visual methodology was employed over a two-phased research project, first social work students were asked to draw an image of what they thought practice education looked like, phase two used photo eliciation, PEs were then asked to explore the meaning of these images. Results demonstrated that social work students focused on their own professional discourse, the identity of PEs, power relationship and dynamics between themselves and PEs, the disjointed journey and practice education in its entirity. Whilst the PEs shared their personal views of practice education and reflected on this, both groups had a shared understanding of practice education including its values and frustrations. Keywords: social work placements, visual methodology, practice educator

A method for mapping Australian woody vegetation cover by linking continental-scale field data and long-term Landsat time series

There is a significant need to provide nationwide consistent information for land managers and scientists to assist with property planning, vegetation monitoring applications, risk assessment, and conservation activities at an appropriate spatial scale. We created maps of woody vegetation cover of Australia using a consistent method applied across the continent, and made them accessible. We classified pixels as woody or not woody, quantified their foliage projective cover, and classed them as forest or other wooded lands based on their cover density. The maps provide, for the first time, cover density estimates of Australian forests and other wooded lands with the spatial detail required for local-scale studies. The maps were created by linking field data, collected by a network of collaborators across the continent, to a time series of Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ images for the period 2000-2010. The fractions of green vegetation cover, non-green vegetation cover, and bare ground were calculated for each pixel using a previously developed spectral unmixing approach. Time series statistics, for the green vegetation cover, were used to classify each pixel as either woody or not using a random forest classifier. An estimate of woody foliage projective cover was made by calibration with field measurements, and woody pixels classified as forest where the foliage cover was at least 0.1. Validation of the foliage projective cover with field measurements gave a coefficient of determination, R-2, of 0.918 and root mean square error of 0.070. The user's and producer's accuracies for areas mapped as forest were high at 92.2% and 95.9%, respectively. The user's and producers's accuracies were lower for other wooded lands at 75.7% and 61.3%, respectively. Further research into methods to better separate areas with sparse woody vegetation from those without woody vegetation is needed. The maps provide information that will assist in gaining a better understanding of our natural environment. Applications range from the continental-scale activity of estimating national carbon stocks, to the local scale activities of assessing habitat suitability and property planning

Frontal haemodynamic responses in depression and the effect of electroconvulsive therapy

BACKGROUND: Reduced frontal cortex metabolism and blood flow in depression may be associated with low mood and cognitive impairment. Further reduction has been reported during a course of electroconvulsive therapy but it is not known if this relates to mood and cognitive changes caused by electroconvulsive therapy. // AIMS: The purpose of this study was to investigate frontal function while undertaking cognitive tasks in depressed patients compared with healthy controls, and following electroconvulsive therapy in patients. // METHODS: We measured frontal haemodynamic responses to a category verbal fluency task and a working memory N-back task using portable functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) in 51 healthy controls and 18 severely depressed patients, 12 of whom were retested after the fourth treatment of a course of electroconvulsive therapy. Mood was assessed using the Montgomery Åsberg Depression Rating Scale and cognitive function using category Verbal Fluency from the Controlled Oral Word Association Test and Digit Span backwards. // RESULTS: Compared to healthy controls, depressed patients had bilaterally lower frontal oxyhaemoglobin responses to the cognitive tasks, although this was only significant for the N-Back task where performance correlated inversely with depression severity in patients. After four electroconvulsive therapy treatments oxyhaemoglobin responses were further reduced during the Verbal Fluency task but the changes did not correlate with mood or cognitive changes. // DISCUSSION: Our results confirmed a now extensive literature showing impaired frontal fNIRS oxyhaemoglobin responses to cognitive tasks in depression, and showed for the first time that these are further reduced during a course of electroconvulsive therapy. Further research is needed to investigate the biology and clinical utility of frontal fNIRS in psychiatric patients

Assessing the effects of site heterogeneity and soil properties when unmixing photosynthetic vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation and bare soil fractions from Landsat and MODIS data

Vegetation fractional cover is a key metric for monitoring land management, both in pastoral and agricultural settings. Monitoring vegetation fractional cover continuously across large areas needs good remote sensing techniques underpinned by high quality field data to calibrate and validate algorithms. Here Landsat and MODIS surface reflectance data together with 1171 field observations across Australia were used to estimate vegetation fractional cover using a linear unmixing technique. The aim was to estimate the fractions of photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic vegetation (PV and NPV, respectively) and the remaining fraction of bare soil (BS). Landsat surface reflectance was averaged over a 3×3 pixel window representing the field area measured and also "degraded" using a 17×17 pixel window (~0.26km) to approximate the coarser MODIS sensor's response. These two Landsat surface reflectances were used to calculate a site heterogeneity metric. Data from two MODIS-derived surface reflectance products with a pixel size of ~0.25km were used: (i) the 16-day nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance product (MCD43A4); and (ii) the MODIS 8-day surface reflectance (MOD09A1). Log transforms and band interaction terms were added to account for non-linearities in the spectral mixing. A cross-validation step was also included to select the optimal number of singular values to avoid over-fitting. For each surface reflectance source we investigated the residuals' correlation with site heterogeneity, soil colour and soil moisture. The best model was obtained when Landsat data for a small region around each observation were used. Root mean square error (RMSE) values of 0.112, 0.162 and 0.130 for PV, NPV and BS, respectively, were obtained. As expected, degrading the Landsat data to ~0.26km around each site decreased model goodness of fit to RMSE of 0.119, 0.174 and 0.150, respectively, for the three fractions. Using MODIS surface reflectance data gave worse results than the "degraded" Landsat surface reflectance, with MOD09A1 performing slightly better than MCD43A4. No strong evidence of soil colour or soil moisture influence on model performance was found, suggesting that the unmixing models are insensitive to soil colour and/or that the soil moisture in the top few millimetres of soil, which influence surface reflectance in optical sensors, is decoupled from the soil moisture in the top layer (i.e., a few centimetres) as measured by passive microwave sensors or estimated by models. This study outlines an operational combined Landsat/MODIS product to benefit users with varying requirements of spatial resolution and temporal frequency and latency that could be applied to other regions in the world

The Polycystic Ovary Post-Rotterdam: A Common, Age-Dependent Finding in Ovulatory Women without Metabolic Significance

Introduction: The age-specific prevalence of polycystic ovaries (PCO), as defined by the Rotterdam criteria, among normal ovulatory women, has not yet been reported. It is also uncertain whether these women differ from their peers in the hormonal or metabolic profile

Approaches to establishing a metadata standard for field spectroscopy datasets

There is an urgent need within the international remote sensing community to establish a metadata standard for field spectroscopy that ensures high quality, interoperable metadata sets that can be archived and shared efficiently within Earth observation data sharing systems. Careful examination of all stages of metadata collection and analysis can inform a robust standard that is applicable to a range of field campaigns. This paper presents approaches towards a standard that encompasses in situ metadata collection and initiatives towards sharing metadata within intelligent archiving systems

Tropical forest canopies and their relationships with climate and disturbance : results from a global dataset of consistent field-based measurements

Background: Canopy structure, defined by leaf area index (LAI), fractional vegetation cover (FCover) and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fAPAR), regulates a wide range of forest functions and ecosystem services. Spatially consistent field-measurements of canopy structure are however lacking, particularly for the tropics. Methods: Here, we introduce the Global LAI database: a global dataset of field-based canopy structure measurements spanning tropical forests in four continents (Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas). We use these measurements to test for climate dependencies within and across continents, and to test for the potential of anthropogenic disturbance and forest protection to modulate those dependences. Results: Using data collected from 887 tropical forest plots, we show that maximum water deficit, defined across the most arid months of the year, is an important predictor of canopy structure, with all three canopy attributes declining significantly with increasing water deficit. Canopy attributes also increase with minimum temperature, and with the protection of forests according to both active (within protected areas) and passive measures (through topography). Once protection and continent effects are accounted for, other anthropogenic measures (e.g. human population) do not improve the model. Conclusions: We conclude that canopy structure in the tropics is primarily a consequence of forest adaptation to the maximum water deficits historically experienced within a given region. Climate change, and in particular changes in drought regimes may thus affect forest structure and function, but forest protection may offer some resilience against this effect.Peer reviewe