School of Geography - Theses
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ItemLeaf yeasts as indicators of air pollution( 1993)In the early 1970s, Paul Dowding, a botanist at the University of Dublin accidentally discovered that leaf yeasts, especially Sporobolomyces roseus, can be used as indicators of air pollution. Dowding, having forgotten to collect leaves from the country for a 2nd year practical class, took them from his home in the suburbs and from the university grounds in the centre of Dublin. Very few pink yeasts appeared for the students to see in the practical class. Dowding, therefore, conducted a number of citywide surveys over the next few years. These confirmed that numbers of leaf yeasts were consistently lower in the suburbs than in the countryside and reduced even further in the centre of the city. (Dowding, 1980) Based on this chance discovery, a method using leaf yeasts as indicators of air pollution was developed and applied in several European cities. In most cities which monitored air pollution using this technique, maps were drawn indicating areas with high levels of air pollution. (Dowding, 1990) The leaf yeast technique developed by Dowding has the advantage that it is much cheaper than conventional air quality monitoring and facilitates the development of maps of the spatial distribution of pollution. No expensive devices are required and the material necessary for the methodology exists in every basic laboratory. The technique in itself is very simple and according to Dowding (1990) it can even be carried out by schoolchildren. The particular aim of the present study is to test the applicability of the methodology to the Melbourne setting. Air pollution in Melbourne has been monitored using the leaf yeast technique and compared to the results obtained for Melbourne by the Environment Protection Authority (EPA). Furthermore, the extension of the methodology to native species has been investigated. The following chapter reviews the literature on the nature of leaf yeasts and their relation to air pollution. The discussion begins by considering some physical aspects of air pollution and then goes on to describe the air quality in Australia and Melbourne. Additionally, the impact of air pollution on plants is outlined. This chapter concludes with a summary of the nature of leaf yeasts and their reactions to airborne pollutants. Chapter 3 describes the methods used to monitor air pollution with leaf yeasts and sets out the advantages and limitations of this technique. Chapter 4 describes preliminary investigations which were carried out to test the applicability of the method in Melbourne and the possibility of using native species as bioindicators. This is followed by a discussion of the sensitivity of leaf yeasts to air pollution. The occurrence of leaf yeast populations in different seasons and in different areas is examined and described in Chapter 5 using the same data for both investigations. Chapter 6 describes an attempt to increase the data coverage in Melbourne with the participation of schools in data collection. This chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this approach which has been widely used in Europe by Dowding (Dowding, 1988,1990) In Chapter 7 an attempt is made to correlate the spatial distribution of air pollution in Melbourne as indicated by the leaf yeast surveys with data collected by the Victorian Environment Protection Authority using conventional air quality monitoring stations. Finally, an overview and summary of this work are presented in Chapter 8 with a discussion of the utility and applicability of this method in Melbourne.
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ItemExemplar emulation and journalism: the rhetoric of the Zhao Zhankui campaign in Yan'an( 1993)The subject of my thesis is the role of the Chinese press in exemplar emulation campaigns. By examining one such campaign in the early years of the Chinese Communist Party and locating it in a tradition that began before Communist history and has continued to this day, I will demonstrate how the press played a vital part in social transformation by propagating new meanings of events and generating new modes of social action.
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ItemThe impact of agricultural modernisation on women in traditional agriculture : a case study on the effects of the Green Revolution on Indo-Fijian women in rice farming( 1992)From ancient days, women have played a pivotal role in agriculture. They have not only attended to various field operations like transplanting and post-harvest operations like harvesting, threshing and drying but have also provided much of the unpaid family labour in agriculture. The roles of farm women in agriculture can be classified as follows: (i) contributor in agricultural production; (ii) responsible for the management of cattle and other farm animals; (iii) responsible for storage of seeds and food grains and processing; and (iv) decision - maker. The 'green revolution' in rice production has attracted enormous attention. The green revolution is used loosely to cover so much technological, agrarian and social change, in so many countries and zones, with so many ecological and social differences that generalisations are precarious and subject to exceptions [CHAMBERS, 1984:362]. Central to the green revolution has been the dissemination of the ,'new rice t�chnology' - high yielding rice varieties, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and also, in same cases, tractors and other forms of mechanization. This new technology has been supported by improvements in irrigation, credit facilities and extension; taken as a whole, the ensemble is the green revolution [BYRES and CROW 1983:6]. The central objective of this study is to assess the gender differentiated impact of the green revolution rice package, using the Rewa Rice Irrigation Project (RRIP) in Fiji as the case study. The fieldwork was undertaken in Buiduna, a small Indo-Fijian rice growing community forming part of the RRIP.
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ItemChina's grain production: government policies and their impacts since the 1950s( 1991)China has long been known as a large agricultural country. Agriculture plays an important role in the Chinese economy. Grain, in particular, provides a foundation for this country.l As China has to feed 22 percent of the world's total population with only 7 percent of the total arable land on the earth, food production continues to be the most fundamental task for the Chinese government and the Chinese people. Since the founding of the People's Republic, the Chinese government has initiated a series of agricultural policies to deal with grain production. During the past four decades, government policies have strongly influenced Chinese grain production: favourable policies producing fast increases in grain production and for the whole national economy the appearance of prosperity, unfavourable policies meaning stagnations or declines in grain output and suffering in the national economy. For example, when policy failure led to serious grain shortfalls from 1959 to 1961, the national economy was also grim. Successful reform during the late 1970s and the early 1980s promoted rapid growth in grain production and optimism in the national economy. Due to the importance of grain in the national economy, it is necessary to explicitly examine the relationship between government agricultural policy and grain production. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse systematically the agricultural policies and their impact on grain production during the past four decades. In China, government policy affects grain production through three main channels. The first channel is production organisation, which concerns ownership of land and means of production, as well as the organisation of labour and other resources for grain production. The second channel is the marketing and price system, including types of grain procurement and purchasing price. The third channel is capital investment and technological transformation, which includes sources, quantity and orientation of capital investment, and concrete measures for improving technology. This study traces policies and their impacts on grain production through these three channels.
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ItemLimnological studies of Deep Lake, Antarctica : an investigation of water balance and biotic changes( 1991)Deep Lake is one of a number of hypersaline lakes in the Vestfold Hills, near Davis Station in the Australian Antarctic Territory. The lake water which originated as seawater when the lake basin was isolated from the sea following isostatic uplift of this part of the Antarctic continent, now has a salinity of ten times that of sea water. Due to its extremely high salinity, the lake does not freeze over winter.The lack of insulating ice cover results in winter water temperatures as low as -19 C. As a result of the extremely harsh aquatic conditions, the lake biota consists of only one species of algae ( Dunalie11a sp.) and one species of bacteria (Lacusprofundi sp). Deep Lake is ? closed lake system in which blowing and falling snow, along with summer meltstream flow, account for the total inputs and evaporation is the only output. Throughout 1989 the lake level, water temperature, salinity and abundance of algae cells were regularly monitored. Meteorological records from an automatic weather station located at the north - west corner of the lake, enabled daily evaporation rates to be calculated, using the Bulk-Aerodynamic Method. Estimates of evaporation, meltwater inputs and lake levels were used to construct ? water budget for 1989. In contrast to the long-term trend of a decreasing water level, the results of this study indicate a rising lake level with a corresponding decrease in salinity and an increase in the abundance of algae cells. The rising lake level may be indicative of ? regional climatic change causing an increase in low pressure systems and an increase in precipitation rates, which in turn increases the input to Deep Lake.
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ItemTechnical change, restructuring and profitability of the Australian clothing industry( 1991)Rapid economic growth has been experienced in most Western countries for at least the last century. However, the nature of the world economy has changed dramatically since the 1950s. The most significant development in the world economy during the past few decades has been the industrialisation in Japan and some Third World countries and their increasing importance in the world trade. The reorganisation of production and spatial division of labour between advanced economies and developing economies has changed the order of the international economy. The global shift of production from developed countries to developing countries was attracted by cheap resources, low-labour costs and cheaper raw material, and performed by active state development policy.