Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemGeographies of Refugee settlement: Care, Citizenship, and the role of Non-state Organisations( 2019)This research examines the role and position of the diverse organisations who provide support to people from refugee backgrounds settling in Australia. Non-state organisations in similar contexts have been conceptualised in uneven ways, with previous work understanding them to be ‘filling the gaps’ left by the retraction of the state under neoliberalism, or as working as a shadows-state apparatus. This research challenges such restrictive framings. Engaging with a feminist ethic of care, the research extends geographic literatures that have shown the capacity for organisations to resist and rework repressive influences from the state. Drawing on interviews with a range of organisations across Melbourne, Australia, including community organisations, local governments, faith-based organisations, and generalist charities, the research argues that non-state organisations are indispensable within the settlement landscape in Australia. It highlights the ways in which these organisations both provide people from refugee communities with essential services and resources, and undertake bridging work that allows the state to maintain a restricted and inaccessible approach to social service delivery. It also argues that non-state organisations are active agents in the construction of an expanded citizenship for people from refugee backgrounds, that moves beyond normative and exclusionary imaginaries of Australian citizenship upheld by immigration and settlement policy. Importantly and more broadly, the research shows how a feminist ethic of care informs and shapes the practices of these organisations, offering care-full inclusion in the face of care-less approaches to migration and refugee resettlement in Australia and globally.
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ItemThe Europeanization of the Renewable Energy Directive in France and the United Kingdom( 2019)The European Union’s (EU) Renewable Energy Directive (RED) establishes a renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020, with binding national targets allocated to each member state. The RED is an important component of the EU's longer-term ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emission by at least 80 per cent by 2050. However, implementation of the Directive has been uneven across the 28 member states, potentially undermining the EU’s long-term objectives and its claims to international climate leadership. This thesis examines the Europeanization of the RED in France and the UK with a specific focus on the electricity sectors of the two countries. It compares the implementation of the renewable energy targets in the highly concentrated, state-controlled French sector with the liberalised UK sector. It identifies the drivers of, and impediments to, the effective implementation of the Directive in the two countries with a particular emphasis on the role of state institutions.
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ItemStorytelling REDD+: Ontological Intersections and Inequalities between Global Environmental Governance and Local Lives in Papua New Guinea( 2019)This thesis is about the ontological intersections and inequalities that emerge as initiatives to manage global environmental problems, such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, are translated locally in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It explores the frictions – awkward, unstable and unequal encounters – that are produced, and in turn move forward, different forms of environmental governance as they intersect with local lives in Suau, Milne Bay Province. I examine REDD+, and similarly the Cool Earth conservation program, as governance assemblages: constantly emerging and shifting networks of heterogeneous relations and elements coming together that necessarily impose power to foreground certain assumptions about reality. Through ethnographic fieldwork with communities implicated in the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project and a Cool Earth project, I focus on the stories people in Suau tell of climate change, land and trees, and how these stories come into friction with assumptions that underpin approaches to climate change mitigation and conservation. By engaging with Suau forms of knowledge transmission, including pilipili dai (storytelling), this work makes new contributions to how political ontology is practiced, thereby proposing ways of doing political ecology differently and engaging with decolonial research agendas. Rather than constructing ontologies as bounded, discrete entities, this thesis recognises the multiplicity of ontological assumptions intersecting and competing for primacy, as well as the politics involved in privileging certain assumptions over others. What is at stake here is not just the management of resources and livelihoods, but the very ways different people perceive and perform their realities. The core of this thesis is about inequality. It asks how the foregrounding and marginalising of assumptions enables and constrains different forms of environmental governance that may generate and reinscribe inequalities – not just inequalities between actors, but inequalities between different ways of being and knowing. By opening up space for other ways of perceiving and performing reality, this thesis works to enable different, potentially more equal, approaches to addressing environmental problems.
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ItemContrasting the effects of vegetation clearance on two insectivore communities and their prey at perennial streams in temperate Australia( 2019)The movement of organisms and material between adjacent ecosystems is a ubiquitous process. Over the last three decades, many works have uncovered factors that influence the flux of spatial subsidies. The emergence of new ecosystems via riparian vegetation clearance, for instance, can impact the quantity and quality of the spatial subsidies that move between perennial streams and riparian zones, and this likely incurs complex responses from riparian consumers. This thesis asks two main questions: 1) how does environmental variables in both the donor (streams) and recipient (riparian zones) systems as a result of riparian vegetation clearance impact the relative quantity of active subsidies? 2) Do insectivores with different mobilities and foraging behaviours respond differently to the flux of spatial subsidies and does this interact with environmental variables? I answered these questions across four empirical chapters. This thesis focused on a biome identified as both impacted by agricultural intensification and comprising important perennially flowing freshwater (on the world’s driest inhabited continent): Australia’s temperate zone. In chapter two, I demonstrate longitudinal trends in riparian vegetation clearance at our study streams and tested models relating to spatial subsidies and riparian spider responses. I conducted vegetation surveys and monitored in-stream temperature at six perennial streams that run through a riparian vegetation clearance gradient, and related these to abundances, biomass and community composition of riparian spiders and their prey (including emergent aquatic invertebrates). In chapter three, I focused on the orb-weaving spider species, Tetragnatha valida and compared the relative contributions of low flux, high quality aquatic prey and terrestrial prey to its diet at perennial streams using stable isotope analysis. In chapter four, I investigated the role of riparian vegetation structure and the abundance and biomass of emergent aquatic prey in explaining variation in the foraging activity and community composition of insectivorous bats that occupy perennial stream habitats. Finally, in chapter five I continuously monitored the activity of insectivorous bats at a survey reach to investigate potential concordance between foraging activity, moon illumination and heat accumulation by the stream. This thesis represents ‘another string in the bow’ of spatial subsidy research that focuses on biomes and taxa that are seldom studied. The literature identifies that active subsidies, including emergent aquatic invertebrates, must be studied in the context of donor and recipient ecosystem dynamics. Despite this, few studies thoroughly measure these dynamics. The present study bucks this trend and extensively surveys relevant ecosystem characteristics including in-stream temperature and vegetation structure, and in-so-doing provides valuable context which underpins diverse riparian insectivore responses to the flux of spatial subsidies. By contrasting different modes of insectivory, this thesis provides new insight into the trophic dynamics of stream-riparian systems. Studies like these are important in a rapidly changing world.
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ItemHow does deforestation affect the functional links between riparian zones and stream channels?( 2018)Riparian vegetation is essential for headwater streams, as it regulates allochthonous inputs of coarse particulate organic matter (CPOM) delivered into streams. CPOM accumulates in patches across the streambed, these patches are sources of energy and shelter where ecological linkages between aquatic populations occur. This group of studies evaluate such relationships in Hughes Creek, Victoria, southern Australia. The first of these studies evaluates the evidence documented in 45 studies which were undertaken mostly in temperate or subtropical regions of the U.S.A., Canada, Spain and Australia. The main focus of these works was to evaluate the effect of deforestation upon allochthonous inputs of CPOM, often in first and second order streams. Most studies addressed airborne inputs only, while lateral surface inputs, or downstream transport of CPOM were not commonly studied. Hedges’ effect size (g) was calculated for allochthonous inputs data from the 45 articles and plotted against deforestation. A threshold for airborne inputs and benthic organic matter (BOM) standing stock was observed when deforestation reached 70%. At that level of deforestation, effect sizes decreased by up to -5 standard deviations. The second study encompassed a field survey where forested and low forested sites along the one stream were evaluated. The survey required the collection of allochthonous inputs monthly for one year, where airborne, lateral surface transfer (LST), and drifting CPOM fractions were collected in sites with contrasting forest cover. Sites with intact vegetation showed high inputs (14 kg m-2 DW year-1), while deforested reaches showed lower airborne inputs (9.25 kg m-2 DW year-1). LST inputs represented 42% of allochthonous inputs in forested reaches, and 37.5% in deforested sites. The transport of CPOM downstream was similar between forested and deforested sites (23-25 kg DW year-1). Given this similarity in CPOM transportation, and that the majority of streams in Victoria are deforested, patches of riparian forest might be an attractive management option for restoration/management of streams. However, it is necessary to be mindful of the scope and limitations of forested patches along streams, as they might not provide resources to neighbouring areas. Rather, forested sections tend to retain most of their allochthonous inputs within their boundaries. The third study of this thesis comprises a field survey where patches of CPOM, located on the streambed of forested and deforested reaches, were collected in Summer, Spring and Winter. CPOM was separated intro fractions of leaves, bark and twigs. It was found that the type of cover did not modify the mass of CPOM fractions between forested and deforested reaches (p > 0.05). However, the results show significant differences between Sites within Forest Cover for all fractions, with exception of leaf material. The dominant patterns suggest high variation between sites and shifts between seasons. In relation to the contribution of each fraction provided to CPOM benthic standing stock, it was found that during the three sampling seasons, benthic CPOM composition was dominated by, in decreasing order, twigs, bark, leaf, and grass. Additionally, macroinvertebrates found in CPOM patches were separated and sorted into genus and species when possible. The analysis of species densities between forested and deforested sites show that Simulium ornatipes and Ecnomina F sp. densities differed between the two types of forest cover, while the remaining species showed no differences. However, Simulium ornatipes showed strong differences between sites. Ecnomina F sp. was the only taxon to show a significant difference related to forest cover, without having a substantial difference between sites within the same forest cover. On the other hand, Ecnomus continentalis, Notalina sp., Chemautopsyche sp, Hydroptila, Berosus (larvae), and Micronecta sp. showed higher significant differences in summer; whereas Chemautopsyche sp. and Hydroptila sp. densities were minimal in patches during spring. The regressions between the mass of CPOM and density of species showed that some presented negative relationships between specimens’ density and the increase of CPOM mass, as illustrated by Ecnomia F sp., Cheumatopsyche sp., and Nousia sp. The last study of this thesis was a field experiment where the size and spatial distribution of CPOM patches was manipulated, due to small-scale fragmentation being predicted to affect species densities, particularly where patches are ephemeral or organisms are transported advectively. CPOM patches were deployed in two possible configurations (a) one big patch treatment (BPT), comprised of 12 smaller sub-patches of the same size, and (b) 12 split patches (SPT), which were distributed across the streambed. Patches from the split treatment were of two sizes, double (300 cm2) and single (150 cm2). BPT and SPT patches from both treatments were oriented randomly on the stream (parallel or perpendicular) with respect to water flow. After 10 days, samples were collected of 13 common macroinvertebrates which had colonised the patches. It was found that the genera Offadens spp. and Notriolus spp. had responded to the orientation of patches in both treatments. Moreover, in SPT sites Offadens spp., Cheumatopsyche spp., and Notriolus spp. showed significantly higher densities in small patches, suggesting that species densities, which show no searching strategies for resources, are likely to be affected by patch size. The knowledge generated in this thesis provides a greater understanding of the effect upon macroinvertebrates densities by deforestation of a creek that flows through agricultural lands in southern Australian.
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ItemReframing Ocean Acidification: Addressing an emergent governance problem under existing multilateral environmental agreements( 2019)Ocean acidification is increasingly recognized as a potentially devastating threat to marine ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. Despite this, no existing multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) explicitly requires a response to it and the issue remains largely unaddressed in international environmental law and policy. Many scholars and practitioners have sought to address ocean acidification under existing agreements, largely via proposals for treaty amendments or the conclusion of new legal instruments such as implementing agreements or protocols. Implementation of these proposals has been limited. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the possible MEA governance of ocean acidification. This is done by analysing existing treaty texts through alternative problem frames (treaty interpretation) and comparing their capacity to respond to ocean acidification against an idealized version of ocean acidification governance (gap-analysis). This thesis contends that the current framing of ocean acidification as a CO2 problem concurrent to climate change has resulted in the problem being regarded as predominantly outside the mandates of most MEAs, thereby narrowing the scope of responses available and creating significant gaps in the global governance architecture for ocean acidification. It argues that the utilization of alternative problem frames can situate the issue more effectively within existing MEA mandates, thereby opening up response options without the need for the development of new legal instruments.
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ItemMapping experiential-expertise and risk using qualitative GIS on hazardous rocky coasts( 2019)Drownings on hazardous rocky coasts are a global problem but are an especially acute issue in Australia where they account for 19% of all coastal drownings. The risk of drowning while fishing from rocky coasts is primarily understood as an outcome of overtopping waves sweeping ‘rock fishers’ off rocky platforms and into the sea, with associated solutions focusing primarily on raising awareness of this risk. Few studies have explored how rock fishers perceive risk, nor how their length of experience influences their behaviour. This thesis explores the different ways that rock fishers perceive risk as well as how closely ‘experiential-experts’ perceptions align with rock fishing-related drowning incidents in the National Coronial Information System (NCIS). Experienced fishers are considered noncertified experiential-experts, whose repeated first-hand experience with risk informs their ‘expert’ perceptions. An innovative mixed methodology integrating qualitative GIS methods was used to address five key areas: First, exploring the spatial and temporal processes that differentiate risk perceptions of experienced from inexperienced rock fishers is done by conceptualising risk as relational. Second, the different ways fishers move through and map hazardous space is explored. Overlaying fishers’ GPS movement with sketch maps is used to visualise how fishers with different lengths of experience navigate and represent their everyday practices in hazardous space. Third, experiential-experts’ perceptions of ‘freak waves’ are compared to rock fishing-related drowning incidents in the NCIS. Fourth, experiential-experts’ perceptions of how fishers enter the sea and drown are compared to how drownings are reported in the NCIS. Lastly, fishers’ collective risk management practices are discussed with reference to the predominant framing of risk as an individualized phenomenon. Results suggest that years of experience in hazardous coastal environments helps fishers become more capable of anticipating and reacting to hazardous situations ‘safely’ because they are more attuned to how changing conditions affect risk. This includes experiential-experts’ attunement to where, how, and why risk will emerge in different spaces, depending on the daily interrelationships between coastal conditions. Attunement to how these interrelations affect site-specific hazards was also used to challenge common myths (e.g. freak waves) perpetuated by the media and in government signage. This draws attention to the spatial and temporal phenomenon that drives risk perceptions as well as the implications for future perception-oriented research that adopts a relational understanding. By adopting a relational understanding of risk, this thesis also opens new possibilities for understanding human-environment systems, which typically overlook how, where, and for how long risky human-environment interactions are perceived in space, if at all. The results may inform coastal risk managers as they consider experiential-experts' perceptions of the human-environment interactions that produce risk and the relational ways in which people anticipate and react to risk while undertaking hazardous activities.
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ItemHigh-rise living in the middle-class suburb: a geography of tactics and strategies( 2019)Within new configurations of the ‘Great Australian Dream’, high-rise living in Australian cities has become not only an acceptable housing configuration for the middle classes but also a desirable one. Enquiring deeply into the tactics and strategies that building inhabitants use to live vertically in the city, this thesis explores the ways in which the design, inhabitation, and maintenance of middle-class high-rise developments are negotiated in Melbourne inner-suburbs. It explores dwellers’ agency in the negotiation of design choices and co-production of high-rise spaces, using mixed qualitative methods combining walking tours and semi-directed interviews. Drawing on the new geography of architecture and on a relational approach to housing and home, the research engages with a theory of practice acknowledging tactical and strategic actions in the city. It argues that dwellers reshape the socio-material configurations and spatial relations of apartment living set by designers, developers and housing technologists. Explicitly recognising of the role of social class in high-rise living, the research suggests that apartment developments are highly contested sites where intended lifestyles and aspirations are negotiated by varied institutions and actors, through a distinctive set of temporal and spatial actions. It finds that competing actors all work towards the co-production of high-rise living spaces and cultures. However, the thesis also shows that housing relations in the practice of middle-class apartment living outline an uneven and changing distribution of power between those who develop strategies and those who craft tactics. More broadly, this research opens up a deeper understanding of how this new kind of vertical city reflects and transforms configurations of status, power and identity in the Australian suburb.
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ItemA northward shift of the Southern Westerlies during the Antarctic cold reversal: evidence from Tasmania, Australia( 2018)The Southern Hemisphere Westerlies are one of the most important components of the Earth’s climate system: they are the primary driver of Southern Hemisphere climate, they modulate global ocean circulation patterns, and they are a critical natural driver of atmospheric CO2 variation. Despite their clear importance, their dynamics in response to rapid changes in climate boundary conditions are poorly understood. Critical to this lack of understanding is (1) an absence of robust proxy-data from the Australian sector of the Southern Hemisphere, which hampers attempts at predictive modelling, and (2) a lack of consensus within the palaeoclimate literature as to how the Southern Westerlies have responded to past periods of rapid climate change. A case in point is the behaviour of the Southern Westerlies during the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR; 14,000 – 13,700 years ago), a millennial-scale climate event that punctuated the termination of the Last Ice Age in the Southern Hemisphere. A thorough understanding of how this critical climate component changed during the ACR is hampered by the only available proxy-dataset from the Australian sector of the Southern Hemisphere, which disagrees with records from other regions, and with the leading conceptual understanding of Southern Westerly dynamics. To address this discord, this thesis sought to reconstruct the dynamics of the Southern Westerlies in the Australian sector by developing two robust terrestrial proxy-datasets from Tasmania, Australia, covering the ACR. The results from this thesis demonstrate that the Southern Westerlies responded to the climatic changes of the ACR as predicted by the leading conceptual understanding of their dynamics, and also revealed that they responded symmetrically across the Southern Hemisphere, coincident with substantial changes in atmospheric CO2 variation. This thesis supports the hypotheses that the Southern Westerlies are the primary determinant of long-term Tasmanian climate variation and are a critical regulator of long-term global atmospheric CO2 variation.
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ItemFloodplain avulsion channels: understanding their distribution and how they reconnect to the parent channel( 2018)This study is concerned with new river channels that develop on floodplains. These channels can develop gradually, or they can develop more rapidly (avulsions). This study concentrates on the relatively more rapid channel changes known as avulsions. An avulsion specifies the gradual abandonment of an existing river-channel and in response to this, the processes of development of a new channel on a floodplain nearby. The study addresses two specific knowledge gaps: 1) how common are river floodplain avulsions globally, and 2) what are the detailed processes that occur at the up and downstream points where avulsions connect to the main channel? Using random sampling from a global spatial layer I discovered that developing avulsions are extremely common on alluvial floodplains globally, wherever the floodplain is wider than several channel widths. Avulsions are most common on single thread meandering floodplain types, but a review of avulsion literature shows that research is biased to relatively less common floodplain types. Avulsions increase the rate of valley widening, particularly in narrow floodplains. There is a relationship between floodplain width and the number of avulsion channels. The rest of the thesis is focussed in the major process knowledge gap which is how avulsion channels connect into the main channel at the up and downstream ends. The focus of the process component of this study is the broad Murray river floodplain from Yarrawonga to Echuca, SE Australia. I mapped and classified developing channels on the floodplain and found that the avulsion connection point here develops in an unusual way, involving the development and coalescence of low points (depressions) on the levee (this mechanism is very different from normal crevasse splay development). The chain of low points on the alluvial levee coalesce to form a levee channel. Rather than forming by erosion as expected from the literature, form progressively by locally reduced vertical accretion. This identifies a new process by which topography is developed on floodplains. Initially the levee channels are not connected with the Murray main stream and slope away from the river. The connection occurs by lateral migration of the river bank into the levee channel, but also by progressive upslope (river ward) migration of the deepest part of the levee channel towards the river, narrowing the gap between the river and the levee channel. Following connection, the levee channel captures flow from the river, and hydraulic modelling shows that shear stress is sufficient to erode the upstream end of the levee channel. As the channel erodes the shear stress declines, but the proportion of back-flow from the flood recession increases. The result is that the slope of the levee channel reverses to slope towards the river. This is a new mechanism, and it is critical in the sequence of avulsion development. The final stage of the development of avulsion is when a knickzone moves up the levee channel joining another levee channel that is leaving the river upvalley. This is new mechanism of avulsion likely to operate in low energy river systems dominated by fine-grained sediments.