This thesis develops a framework for making ecologically sustainable decisions. It is an integrative thesis that draws its data from the fundamental concepts underlying the disciplines of psyschology, linguistics and biology. Its orientation is essentially theoretical, but its application is practical. It is presented in three parts. Part 1 sets out the theoretical context and proposes a basis for understanding decision-making processes in an interactive, evolutionary context. This part focuses particularly on subjective factors that play a role when an organism is in the process of making a decision. Part 1 provides an underpinning for the core of the thesis. Part 2 forms this core. It considers the context in which decisions are made and overviews current decision-making frameworks that aim at ecologically sustainable outcomes. It proposes a process of metabolic mapping of materials and energy flows across integrated socio-political bioregions as a basis for decision-making. Part 3 considers the implications of the approach in terms of its utility, reliability and validity. This part also looks at the role of ethics in decision-making and outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the new approach. The principle rinding is that research and decision-making are fundamentally distinct, often confused concepts. An integrative approach to decision-making is required to counter the increasing fragmentation in research and professional and administrative specialisation. A research tool that bridges the plethora of theoretical orientations is proposed. This involves the use of a semantic metalanguage to capture meaning in a rigorous and verifiable way. Such a metalanguage gives us a means of understanding the subjective experience of organisms, and in particular, their subjective perception of reality which guides their decision-making. A second finding is that, unlike research, which necessarily involves a process of context reduction, sound decision-making necessarily involves a process of context augmentation. And finally it proposes a method of metabolic mapping on a bioregional basis operating under the principle of subsidiarity as the most appropriate route towards sustainable decision-making.

Current rates of extinctions are estimated to be around 1000 times higher than background rates that would occur without anthropogenic impacts. These extinction rates refer to the traditional view of extinctions, i.e. numerical extinctions. This thesis is about another type of extinctions: functional extinctions. Those occur when the abundance of a species is too small to uphold the species’ ecologically interactive role. I have taken a theoretical approach and used dynamical models to investigate functional extinctions and threshold values for species’ mortality rates in ecological networks. More specifically, I have derived threshold values for focal species mortality rates at which another species or the focal species itself goes numerically extinct (Paper I-II), or transgresses some predefined threshold abundance (Paper III). If an increased mortality rate of a focal species causes another species to go numerically extinct, the focal species can be regarded as functionally extinct, since its abundance is no longer large enough to uphold its ecologically interactive role. Such functional extinctions are investigated in the first papers (Paper I-II). In the following paper, limits for both increased and decreased mortality rates of species are explored (Paper III). Paper III also extends the basic theoretical idea developed in paper I-II into a more applied setting. In this paper I develop a time series approach aimed at estimating fishing mortalities associated with a low risk that any species in a community transgresses some predefined critical abundance threshold. In the last paper (Paper IV) the community wide effect of changes in the abundance of species is investigated. In the first paper (Paper I) I investigate threshold levels for the mortality rate of species in ecological networks. When an increased mortality rate of a focal species causes another species to go extinct, the focal species can be characterized as functional extinct, even though it still exists. Such functional extinctions have been observed in a few systems, but their frequency and general patterns have been unexplored. Using a new analytical method the patterns and frequency of functional extinctions in theoretical and empirical ecological networks are explored. It is found that the species most likely to be the first to go extinct is not the species whose mortality rate is increased, but instead another species in the network. The species which goes extinct is often not even directly linked to the species whose mortality rate is increased, but instead indirectly linked. Further, it is found that large-bodied species at the top of food chains can only be exposed to small increases in mortality rate and small decreases in abundance before going functionally extinct compared to small-bodied species lower in the food chains. These results illustrate the potential importance of functional extinctions in ecological networks and lend support to arguments advocating a more community-oriented approach in conservation biology, with target levels for populations based on ecological functionality rather than the mere persistence of species. In Paper II I use the approach developed in Paper I to explore the frequency and patterns of functional extinctions in ecological networks with varying proportions of mutualistic and antagonistic (predator-prey) interactions. The general results from Paper I are also found in Paper II; that is, an increased mortality rate of one focal species often first leads to an extinction of another species rather than to an extinction of the focal species itself. Further, the frequency of functional extinctions is higher in networks containing a mixture of interaction types than in networks with only antagonistic interactions. Overall, this study generalize the findings of paper I for networks containing a variety of interaction types. To make the theoretical approaches developed in paper I-II operational in a management setting I develop a time series approach aimed at estimating ecologically sustainable fishing mortalities in a multispecies fisheries context (Paper III). An ecologically sustainable fishing mortality is here defined as a long-term fishing mortality associated with a multispecies objective which infers a low risk that any species, either the focal species itself or another species, in a community transgresses a critical biomass limit, below which the risk of recruitment failure is high. The approach is exemplified using a statistical food web model of the dominating fish stocks in the Baltic Sea. For the most abundant fish stock a counterintuitive result is found; it is more likely that the multispecies objective is met if its mortality caused by fishing is increased compared to if it is decreased. Further, simultaneous changes of the fishing mortality of a number of interacting species in the food web model shows a much narrower region of possible sustainable fishing mortalities than a single species approach, something that is not captured by current stock assessment models. Altogether these results are governed by indirect effects propagating in the community and pinpoints the need to adopt community dynamical approaches in fisheries management. The population sizes of many species in the world are declining. Negative population trends are particular pronounced in large-bodied herbivores and carnivores, species known to play important regulatory roles in many ecosystems. Although this indicates that the ecological consequence of declining populations of species might be profound, its impact on ecosystem stability remains largely unexplored. In paper IV it is therefore explored how declining populations of rare and common species affects the resilience – recovery rate – of ecological networks. An analytical approximation shows that network resilience is a function of the harmonic mean of the species’ abundances. This means that network resilience is especially sensitive to declining abundances of rare species. Consistent with this analytically derived result, a clear and positive relationship between resilience and the abundance of the rarest species in a broad spectrum of dynamical models of ecological networks is found. Together these results illustrate the potentially negative consequences of declining populations of rare species for the stability of the ecological systems in which they are embedded, and provide ecological arguments for the protection and management of rare species.

With the rise in industrial capitalism during the 20th Century, artists increasingly focused on the threat of a disappearing natural world. In the high technology era of the late 20th Century, artists whose practice is termed 'ecological' based their work around new understandings of the relationship between nature and culture, fundamentally underpinned by a shift toward evolutionary, systems-theoretical perspectives from those of conquest and exploitation. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the information era has brought into intersection the discourses of information technologies, quantum physics, and biological science, awakening artists to the challenge of engaging with ecology as the primary subject of their practice. The doctoral project that is the subject of this exegesis focuses critical attention on our scientific and aesthetic understandings of water - a crucial symbolic element of global import in survival. It explores the representation of water in and through art practice that is informed by political ecological awareness and new (digital) technologies. My practice exploits the potential of recent digital technologies to create experiences that aim to encourage a more ecologically sustainable human engagement with nature through this focus on water. This exegesis describes and locates the creative work within an ongoing discourse in contemporary culture that actively seeks to re-establish and redefine the relationship between culture and nature.

O atual âmbito alimentar está subordinado ao crescente número de habitantes em áreas urbanas e à vulnerabilidade da distribuição agroalimentar, colocando em risco a permanência da agricultura em áreas de crescente densidade populacional e colocando em risco a manutenção do abastecimento alimentar. No caso de Porto Alegre, a administração municipal instaurou o retorno da zona rural, a fim de manter a agricultura na capital, bem como penalizou os feirantes das Feiras Ecológicas de Porto Alegre que não estivessem regularizados pela certificação orgânica, a fim de manter a segurança dos alimentos comercializados nas feiras. Portanto, apesar do zoneamento e da regulamentação, cabe indagar se estas medidas, tomadas pela gestão municipal, poderão manter a atividade agrícola de base ecológica. O objetivo desta pesquisa é compreender os fatores de permanência dos agricultores nas atividades agrícolas de base ecológica em Porto Alegre. A fundamentação teórica foi baseada em Karl Polanyi (2000), a partir da obra “A Grande Transformação: as origens de nossa época”, considerando, fundamentalmente, a abordagem formalista e a abordagem substantivista. Além de Polanyi, outros autores foram utilizados, como Block (2003); Adaman e Madra (2002); Caporal e Costabeber (2004) e Mertz (2002). Como instrumento metodológico foi empregada a análise de conteúdo. Como resultado, os principais fatores apurados em relação à permanência da atividade agrícola de base ecológica em Porto Alegre foram quatro. O primeiro refere-se ao protecionismo; o segundo refere-se à regulamentação; o terceiro refere-se à subjetividade econômica deste mercado e o quarto refere-se ao comportamento como sujeito econômico binário (subject-object-binary) dos agricultores. / The current food situation is related to the growing number of population in urban areas and to the vulnerability of agri-food distribution, putting at risk the permanence of agriculture in areas of increasing population density and making food supply vulnerable. In the case of Porto Alegre, the local government introduced the return of the “ rural area ” in order to maintain agricultur al production in the capital, as well as penalized the farmers of Ecological Fairs of Porto Alegre that were not regularized by organic certification. Therefore, despite the zoning and regulation, it is questionable whether these measures, taken by the municipal management, could maintain ecologically agricultural activity. So, the goal of this research is to understand the permanence factors of ecologically-based farmers in agricultural activities in Porto Alegre. The theoretical basis was based on Karl Polanyi (2000), from the work "The Great Transformation: the origins of our time", considering the formalist approach and the substantivist approach. Besides Polanyi, other authors were used, The theoretical basis is constituted by Karl Polanyi (2000), as well as by the contribution of other authors such as Block (2003); Adaman and Madra (2002); Caporal and Costabeber (2004) and Mertz (2002). As a result, the main factors in relation to the permanence of ecologically based agricultural activity in Porto Alegre were four. The first refers to protectionism; the second refers to regulation; the third refers to the economic subjectivity of this market and the fourth refers to behavior as a binary economic subject (subject-object-binary) of the farmers.

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2017-05-25T12:38:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Diogo Pedro Appel Dilly_.pdf: 3124151 bytes, checksum: 9a63874c881992f4eab593eb0746da7a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-25T12:38:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Diogo Pedro Appel Dilly_.pdf: 3124151 bytes, checksum: 9a63874c881992f4eab593eb0746da7a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-01-13 / Nenhuma / A humanidade vem esgotando os recursos naturais numa velocidade sem precedentes e a indústria da construção civil é uma das maiores responsáveis. As práticas sustentáveis existem para direcionar e influenciar projetos, materiais, sistemas e tecnologias para que se tornem ecologicamente corretos, socialmente justos e economicamente viáveis. O telhado verde surge como uma solução projetual de extrema expressão junto aos conceitos de desenvolvimento sustentável. Considerando a falta de material técnico, o presente trabalho pode ser apresentado como uma forma de reunir as características deste sistema em um documento em forma de tratado, que expõe de forma didática um ou vários assuntos a respeito de uma ciência. Este estudo trata do sistema de Telhado Verde Extensivo em lajes planas com foco em edificações de pequeno e médio porte. A pesquisa foi elaborada em três partes: contextualização histórica - compreendendo o telhado verde como um elemento milenar mas com novos usos - tipos de telhado verde e composição do sistema - elencando o telhado verde extensivo como objeto da pesquisa - e características do sistema – explanando sobre os benefícios do telhado verde junto as práticas sustentáveis. A escolha do tipo de telhado verde entre "tradicional" e "laminar" pode ter maior influência no dimensionamento das estruturas, assim como a escolha do tipo de substrato e vegetação. A vegetação também depende da utilização prevista para o telhado verde, sendo a grama o tipo mais comum para se ganhar área útil. O telhado verde pode ser considerado um sistema sustentável, pois, pode colaborar no gerenciamento de águas pluviais absorvendo parte da água no próprio sistema, graças à vegetação, substrato e camada drenante. A vegetação do sistema também pode colaborar para mitigar os efeitos de ilhas de calor, diminuindo as temperaturas ao seu redor e melhorando a circulação de ar nas cidades. A temperatura também pode ser mais facilmente controlada pelo sistema de telhado verde, que funciona como um excelente isolante térmico, não deixando o calor entrar na edificação durante o verão e segurando o calor dentro da edificação no inverno. Essa característica faz com que os gastos com energia sejam consideravelmente menores. Alguns países, inclusive o Brasil, têm posto o sistema em evidência e já consideram a utilização do telhado verde de extrema importância. / Humanity has been depleting natural resources at an unprecedented speed being the construction industry one of the biggest responsible for it. Sustainable practices exist to direct and influence projects, materials, systems and technologies so that they become ecologically correct, socially just, and economically viable. The green roof appears as a project solution of extreme expression next to the concepts of sustainable development. Considering the lack of technical material, the present work could be stated as a way to bring the characteristics of this system into a document in the form of a treaty, that lecture one or more subjects in a didactic way about an specific science. This study deals with the Extensive Green Roof system in flat roof covers for small and medium size buildings. The research was elaborated in three parts: historical contextualization - understanding the green roof as being an ancient element in architecture with new uses – green roof types and components: listing the Extensive Green Roof as the object of the research – and the characteristics of the green roof system: explaining the system benefits along with sustainable practices. The choice of the green roof type between "traditional" and "laminar" may have a greater influence on the design of the structures, as well as the choice of substrate and vegetation type. The vegetation also depends on the intended use for the green roof, with grass being the most common type to gain floor area. The green roof can be considered a sustainable system because it can collaborate in the management of rainwater by absorbing part of the water in the system itself, due to the vegetation, substrate and draining layer. The vegetation of the system can also help mitigate the effects of heat islands, reducing temperatures around them and improving air circulation in urbanized areas. The temperature can also be more easily controlled by the green roof system, which works as an excellent thermal insulation, not letting the heat enter the building during the summer and holding the heat inside the building in the winter. This makes energy expenditures considerably smaller. Some countries, including Brazil, consider the use of the green roof system as being of extreme importance.

Deep neural networks have achieved tremendous success in many domains (e.g., computer vision~\cite{Alexnet12,vggnet15,fastrcnn15}, speech recognition~\cite{hinton2012deep,dahl2012context}, natural language processing~\cite{dahl2012context,collobert2011natural}, games~\cite{silver2017mastering,silver2016mastering}), however, there are still many challenges in deep learning comunity such as how to speed up training large deep neural networks, how to compress large nerual networks for mobile/embed device without performance loss, how to automatically design the optimal network structures for a certain task, and how to further design the optimal networks with improved performance and certain model size with reduced computation cost. To speed up training large neural networks, we propose to use multinomial sampling for dropout, i.e., sampling features or neurons according to a multinomial distribution with different probabilities for different features/neurons. To exhibit the optimal dropout probabilities, we analyze the shallow learning with multinomial dropout and establish the risk bound for stochastic optimization. By minimizing a sampling dependent factor in the risk bound, we obtain a distribution-dependent dropout with sampling probabilities dependent on the second order statistics of the data distribution. To tackle the issue of evolving distribution of neurons in deep learning, we propose an efficient adaptive dropout (named evolutional dropout) that computes the sampling probabilities on-the-fly from a mini-batch of examples. To compress large neural network structures, we propose a simple yet powerful method for compressing the size of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based on parameter binarization. The striking difference from most previous work on parameter binarization/quantization lies at different treatments of $1\times 1$ convolutions and $k\times k$ convolutions ($k>1$), where we only binarize $k\times k$ convolutions into binary patterns. By doing this, we show that previous deep CNNs such as GoogLeNet and Inception-type Nets can be compressed dramatically with marginal drop in performance. Second, in light of the different functionalities of $1\times 1$ (data projection/transformation) and $k\times k$ convolutions (pattern extraction), we propose a new block structure codenamed the pattern residual block that adds transformed feature maps generated by $1\times 1$ convolutions to the pattern feature maps generated by $k\times k$ convolutions, based on which we design a small network with $\sim 1$ million parameters. Combining with our parameter binarization, we achieve better performance on ImageNet than using similar sized networks including recently released Google MobileNets. To automatically design neural networks, we study how to design a genetic programming approach for optimizing the structure of a CNN for a given task under limited computational resources yet without imposing strong restrictions on the search space. To reduce the computational costs, we propose two general strategies that are observed to be helpful: (i) aggressively selecting strongest individuals for survival and reproduction, and killing weaker individuals at a very early age; (ii) increasing mutation frequency to encourage diversity and faster evolution. The combined strategy with additional optimization techniques allows us to explore a large search space but with affordable computational costs. To further design the optimal networks with improved performance and certain model size under reduced computation cost, we propose an ecologically inspired genetic approach for neural network structure search , that includes two types of succession: primary and secondary succession as well as accelerated extinction. Specifically, we first use primary succession to rapidly evolve a community of poor initialized neural network structures into a more diverse community, followed by a secondary succession stage for fine-grained searching based on the networks from the primary succession. Accelerated extinction is applied in both stages to reduce computational cost. In addition, we also introduce the gene duplication to further utilize the novel block of layers that appeared in the discovered network structure.

In Australia, Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICM) is the policy framework adopted by government to manage the coastal zone. Amongst other principles, ICM contains an explicit mandate to include local communities in the management of the coastal zone. In Australia, the Coastcare program emerged in response to international acceptance of the need to involve local communities in the management of the coastal zone. This dissertation is a critical cultural investigation of the Coastcare program to discover how the program and the coastal zone generally, is understood and negotiated by three volunteer groups in SE Queensland. There is a paucity of data surrounding the actual experiences of Coastcare volunteers. This dissertation begins to fill this gap in our knowledge of local community involvement in coastal management. My dissertation considers the culture of Coastcare and broadly, community participation initiatives. Coastcare participants, government policymakers, environmental scientists, etc bring to their encounter a specific ‘way of seeing’ the coast – a cultural framework – which guides their actions, ideas and priorities for the coastal zone. These cultural frameworks are established and maintained in the context of unequal relations of power and knowledge. The discourses of environmental science and economics – as evidenced in the chief ICM policy objective, Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) – are powerful knowledges in the realm of community participation policy. This arrangement has serious consequences for what governments and experts can expect to achieve via community participation programs. In short, the quest for ‘power-sharing’ with communities and ‘meaningful participation’ is impeded by dominant scientific and economic cultures which act to marginalise and discredit the cultures of communities (and volunteers). Ironically enough, the lack of consideration of these deeper relations of power and knowledge means that the very groups (such as policymakers, environmental scientists, etc) who actively seek the participation of local communities, contribute disproportionately to the relative failure of community participation programs. At the very least, as those in a position of power, policymakers and associated experts do little to enhance communication with local communities. To this situation add confusion wrought by changes in the delivery of the Coastcare program and a lack of human and financial resources. From this perspective, the warm and fuzzy sentiment of Coastcare can be understood as the ‘Coastcare of neglect’. However, the emergence of community participation as ‘legitimate’ in environmental policymaking indicates a fissure in the traditional power relations between communities and experts. Indeed the entry of ‘community participation policy’ is relatively new territory for the environmental sciences. It is this fissure which I seek to explore and encourage via the application of a cultural studies framework which offers another ‘way of seeing’ community participation in coastal and marine management and thereby, offers avenues to improve relations between communities and experts. My fieldwork reveals a fundamental mismatch between the cultural frameworks which communities bring to the coast and those frameworks embodied and implemented by the Coastcare program. Upon closer examination, it is apparent that the Coastcare program (and community participation programs generally) are designed to introduce local ‘lay’ communities to environmental science knowledge. Local coastal cultures are relegated to the personal and private realm. An excellent example of this is the scientifically oriented ‘eligible areas for funding’ of the Coastcare program. The volunteers consulted for this project emphasized their motivation in terms of ‘maintaining the natural beauty of the coast’ and ‘protecting a little bit of coast from the rampant development of the coastal zone’. Their motivations were largely the antithesis of ESD. They understood their actions as thwarting the negative impacts of coastal development – this occurred within a policy framework which accepted development as fait d’accompli. Australia’s nation of coastal dwellers may not know a lot about ‘coastal ecologies’ but they do know the coast in other ways. Community knowledge of the coast can be largely accounted for in the phrase, ‘Australian beach culture’. Serious consideration of Australian beach culture in environmental policy is absent. The lack of attention to this central tenet of the Australian way of life is because, as a concept and in practice, beach culture lacks the ‘seriousness’ and objectivity of environmental science knowledge – it is about play, hedonism, holidays, spirituality, emotion and fun. The stories (including Indigenous cultural heritage) which emerge when Australians are asked about their ‘beach cultural knowledge’ – historical and contemporary experiences of the Australian coast – await meaningful consideration by those interested in communicating with Australian communities living on the coast. This ‘cultural geography’ is an avenue for policymakers to better communicate and engage with Australian communities in their quest to increase participation in, or motivate interest in community coastal management programs.

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The aim of this Master thesis is to explore why some Swedes want to consume”eco-friendly” and whether this fact gives rise to articulated information needs. Two possible explanations for this ”eco conscious” consumption are being tested, either if it is based on a normative belief that it is the right thing to do if you, as a consumer, want to do something about the environmental degradation, or that it is a reaction to a perceived risk, due to the environmental degradation. The method chosen by the author in this thesis is a qualitative text analysis of five Swedish journals. The author also tries to find articulated expressions for information needs based on the will to consume ”eco friendly” that could either be a result of a perceived risk or a feeling of normative rightness. The findings of this thesis are the following: the opinion among Swedish consumers that it is normatively right to select products perceived to be good for the environment, is the most commonly expressed in the  material examined followed by the view that they (the consumers) need more information as to what products to chose if the they are to satisfy their “environmental ambitions”.</p><p> </p>

Abstract The aim of this Master thesis is to explore why some Swedes want to consume”eco-friendly” and whether this fact gives rise to articulated information needs. Two possible explanations for this ”eco conscious” consumption are being tested, either if it is based on a normative belief that it is the right thing to do if you, as a consumer, want to do something about the environmental degradation, or that it is a reaction to a perceived risk, due to the environmental degradation. The method chosen by the author in this thesis is a qualitative text analysis of five Swedish journals. The author also tries to find articulated expressions for information needs based on the will to consume ”eco friendly” that could either be a result of a perceived risk or a feeling of normative rightness. The findings of this thesis are the following: the opinion among Swedish consumers that it is normatively right to select products perceived to be good for the environment, is the most commonly expressed in the  material examined followed by the view that they (the consumers) need more information as to what products to chose if the they are to satisfy their “environmental ambitions”.

The level of major transporting infrastructure of one culture often reflects its level of civilisation. In the past, the focused of transportation network concentrated mostly on the transporting and safety efficiency, nevertheless, demonstrated very little appreciation of the ecosystem. As the result, the development in conveyance provide a highly convenient modern life style, at the same time brought to the nature environment and landscapes unrecoverable impacts. It is often found that around the world the predominant concerns of early road constructions involved engineering and constructing challenges rather than the considerations of environmental maintenances. This has caused great ecological repayments such as the landslides, the avalanches and the debris flow disaster; consequently, it has become an urgent and vital issue, which has the priory even above economical and tourist developments. In the recent years, under the influences of the global ecologist movements, eco-engineering has become the fashion in our present public transporting infrastructures designs. However, the maturity of such vastly depend on a long term systematically scheme as well as the broad education to the general pubic. This study is based on both national and international related literature survey and the observations from the local experts with references to our internal assignment¡Xthe Green Island Coastal Highway. Its goal is to provide an alternative opinions and inspection on such project.