Evaluating MIKE & PIKE: The Relationship Trend Between Elephant Carcasses & The Illegal Trade in Endangered Elephants

African and Asian elephants face many threats to their population numbers, including habitat loss, climate change, and interactions with humans. However, poaching and the illegal wildlife trade are the largest threats to these species. The first step in the illegal trade is taking or poaching of the elephant – typically the bulls with the largest tusks. Tusk ivory, whether African or Asian, is then exported to transit hubs in Asian countries. Final exported products, either carved or raw, enter the illegal markets located in many Asian countries and cities. Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) and Proportion of Illegally Killed Elephants (PIKE) calculated that more elephant carcasses were found in 2011 than any other year, which resulted in more shipments of ivory leaving Africa and the price of ivory tripling in China. MIKE and PIKE data are analyzed in order to evaluate the crime of elephant poaching and its role in the illegal trade in endangered species.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/urscjs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Experience unbound: The effects of coworking on workplace design practice

This thesis uses the typology of coworking and the values associated with it as a lens through which to look at the design of the broader workplace. It examines the ways in which people behave in these new working environments and how these designed spaces are planned, briefed, commissioned and evaluated. The study responds to a continuing gap in the knowledge around the spatial constitution and behaviours of coworking despite a growing interest from corporate organisations. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on environmental psychology, design practice and the social sciences, the thesis is rooted in both academia and industry, presenting four design studies that map the development and spatial manifestations of coworking and explore user behaviour in space. The thesis explores the values and spatial strategies of coworking through the quantitative analysis of 100 coworking home pages and 73 floor plans, and places coworking in the wider context of historical and current workplace development. Alongside this, it adopts design ethnography techniques to explore user behaviour in space at three different sites: the Impact Hub in Birmingham and Second Home in London - both coworking spaces - and Sony PlayStation in London, a commercial workplace seeking to build a more creative community. Each site uses different strategies for managing change and co-creation, but with the same aims of prioritising user experience and building and supporting collaborative relationships. In the original design study, new user-centred design tools for brief making and evaluation are developed and applied at the Impact Hub and Sony PlayStation. With relatively little academic research into the spaces of coworking, these design studies provide a platform to explore the values, infrastructures and spatial strategies associated with coworking, identify points of departure from established models, and identify whether there are central ideas within coworking that might be applied to the wider workplace. Six original contributions to knowledge are presented: a new definitional model of coworking, quantitative coworking spatial analysis, a design taxonomy of coworking spaces, an adapted framework for considering user experience, a user-centred design toolkit, and recommendations for incorporating aspects of coworking into wider workplace design. The study identifies that the success of a coworking space depends on the experience that they create. This relies on complex and evolving interactions between space, support and service infrastructures, brand identification and community management, and the thesis highlights that simply adopting the spatial strategies or aesthetics of coworking without acknowledging its careful curation of space and relationships is unlikely to produce the desired results. This presents new challenges for the briefing, design and ongoing management of the workplace, which are discussed in the thesis. This PhD concludes with insights into how the essential qualities of coworking might be used to reshape spaces for creative knowledge work alongside a set of practical tools and recommendations that relate to briefing, design and post-occupancy evaluation processes

Determinants of pattern in fynbos vegetation: physical site factors, disturbance regime, species attributes and temporal change

This study set out to explore the patterns and determinants of contemporary species distribution in a fynbos landscape based on information on 1) physical habitat characteristics, 2) past disturbance regime, 3) intrinsic properties of individual species and 4) temporal change in communities. The body of the thesis is divided into four parts covering each of these aspects individually. Each chapter has been written up as an individual paper and thus includes some repetition as well as cross-referencing. Each chapter includes a detailed rationale for the study in the introduction, as well as methods, results and a discussion of the findings. Chapter 2 describes the patterns of vegetation units in the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve and provides a quantitative assessment of the importance of physical site features as determinants of these units. These results are compared with the vegetation classifications of the area derived in earlier studies by Taylor (1984b) and Cowling et al. (1996a). Chapter 3 is the first study in fynbos to partition the variance in vegetation pattern into that explained by physical site factors and that explained by the recent disturbance regime. The study explores the role of 30 years of fire and alien plant infestations in influencing species distribution at the community and landscape scale. While a number of studies have explored spatial determinants of diversity and pattern in fynbos, temporal change within communities has been neglected. High levels of species turnover through time, as a result of colonisation and extinction, could be an important component of diversity at the landscape scale. Hence Chapters 4 and 5 both explore aspects of temporal dynamics in fynbos. The objectives of Chapter 4 are to determine the stability of populations at the landscape scale over a 30-year period and to establish the determinants of local extinction of species. Information on the stability of species over time and the attributes which enable species to persist or go extinct are important for understanding potential impacts of management practices as well as the importance of temporal dynamics in influencing spatial patterns. This is especially appropriate in the context of the results of Chapter 3, which suggest that a high proportion of the variance in species composition is unexplained despite the inclusion of physical factors, and past disturbance regime. The fifth chapter provides a descriptive account of the change in vegetation composition over a 30-year period. It is recommended that those readers not familiar with the fynbos system read it as it provides an overview of a variety of aspects of fynbos dynamics. Its objective is to show how the various components of the disturbance regime, as well as fluctuations in abundance of overstorey Proteaceae and their resultant competitive effects can influence community composition. The final chapter is a general discussion that summarises the major findings of the study