School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemPredicting reliability through structured expert elicitation with repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science)(Early Release, 2021-02-22)
Replication is a hallmark of scientific research. As replications of individual studies are resource intensive, techniques for predicting the replicability are required. We introduce a new technique to evaluating replicability, the repliCATS (Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science) process, a structured expert elicitation approach based on the IDEA protocol. The repliCATS process is delivered through an underpinning online platform and applied to the evaluation of research claims in social and behavioural sciences. This process can be deployed for both rapid assessment of small numbers of claims, and assessment of high volumes of claims over an extended period. Pilot data suggests that the accuracy of the repliCATS process meets or exceeds that of other techniques used to predict replicability. An important advantage of the repliCATS process is that it collects qualitative data that has the potential to assist with problems like understanding the limits of generalizability of scientific claims. The repliCATS process has potential applications in alternative peer review and in the allocation of effort for replication studies.
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ItemDisentangling chronic regeneration failure in endangered woodland ecosystems(Ecological Society of America, 2019-04-14)Ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems requires the facilitation of natural regeneration by plants, often augmented by large-scale active revegetation. The success of such projects is highly variable. Risk factors may be readily identifiable in a general sense, but it is rarely clear how they play out individually, or in combination. We addressed this problem with a field experiment on the survival of, and browsing damage to, 1275 hand-planted buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii) seedlings in a nationally endangered, semi-arid woodland community. Buloke seedlings were planted in 17 sites representing four landscape contexts and with three levels of protection from kangaroo and lagomorph browsing. We censused seedlings and measured herbivore activity four times during the first 400 days post-planting, and fitted models of mortality and browse hazard to these data using survival analysis. Increasing lagomorph activity was associated with higher mortality risk, while kangaroo activity was not. Seedling survival was lowest for each treatment within extant buloke woodland, and the highest survival rates for guarded seedlings were in locations favoured by lagomorphs. Damage from browsing was nearly ubiquitous after one year for surviving unguarded seedlings, despite moderate browser activity. On average, unguarded seedlings showed a decline in height, whereas fully guarded seedlings grew 2.3 cm across the survey period. This study demonstrates buloke seedlings should be protected from browsers, even with browsers maintained at moderate to low density, and the location that maximizes survival, and possibly growth rates, is adjacent to dunes. Further work will test this heuristic in an analysis of cost-effective revegetation strategies for this endangered community.