Thesis (PhDBusinessAdministration)--University of South Australia, 2003.

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Arid areas are often overgrazed and dysfunctional with poor recruitment of desirable species, diminished control over resources and altered soil properties. Restoration ecology re-establishes these valued processes. State-and-transition models summarise knowledge of vegetation dynamics and tools for restoration, and encourage the incorporation of new information. The model developed here for semi-arid woodlands of north-west Victoria highlighted the unknown cause of observed, natural recruitment and the need for a technique, other than direct seeding and handplanting, for enhancing the recruitment of desirable species. I pursued these knowledge gaps for two dominant, woodland trees: Allocasuarina luehmannii and Casuarina pauper. Natural recruitment of juvenile C. pauper was found to be limited and primarily from root suckers. Extensive recruitment of A. luehmannii was shown to be mostly seedlings established following substantial reductions in grazing pressure since 1996. Seedlings were associated with areas devoid of ground flora near a female tree. The importance of competition between seedlings and ground flora, spatial variation in soil moisture and individual variation in the quantity of seed produced deserves further investigation to enhance future restoration success. Root suckers of both C. pauper and A. luehmannii can be artificially initiated, albeit in low numbers and this was found to be a feasible, new tool for restoration. Suckers are preceded by the growth of callus tissue on exposed or damaged, living, shallow roots. Both male and female trees can produce suckers and spring treatments may be more successful. Genetic fingerprinting of mature A. luehmannii and C. pauper trees in six populations did not identify any clonal individuals indicating that recruitment in the past has been from seedlings. Despite this, the high level of gene flow suggests that the impact of introducing small numbers of root suckers into existing populations is unlikely to impact negatively on the population genetics of these species. / Doctor of Philosophy

Heteroblasty defines a dramatic change in leaf form and function along a shoot and is a prominent feature of the genus Acacia (Mimosaceae). Function of different leaf types in Acacia (i.e. compound leaf versus phyllode) is well established yet it is unknown whether heteroblasty is a plastic trait. A fully factorial designed experiment established the light environment, and not nutrients or water, had a significant influence on heteroblastic development. Compound leaves, which have higher specific leaf area (SLA), are retained for longer under low irradiance and, specifically, under a low Red:Far Red light environment. Plants grown in high intraspecific density environments also retained compound leaves for longer. Blue light signals and greater ultraviolet radiation had no effect on heteroblastic development. Heteroblasty is thought to aid in seedling establishment however across all experiments there was no consistent evidence of improved plant performance. Rather, there was an optimal allocation of biomass to organs where resources were most limiting and this was more influential in assisting seedling establishment. Lastly, a meta-analysis of a global dataset of leaf traits found compound leaves to be similar to simple leaves but offset towards the cheap to construct with fast returns region of the leaf economics spectrum.

The thesis is a retrospective reporting and a critical examination of HyperSteel. This is a hypermedia application for architectural education intended to function as a learning bridge between structural knowledge-acquisition and intuitive use. It is one of many parallel developments in software design that have occurred around the world in the last decade (Mitchell 1995). Hypermedia is a set of procedures applied to computer aided learning that is based upon interactive software, typically Apple Computer's Hypercard©, and its successors. How can this medium with its strongly cinematographic characteristics best be used in the imaginative and intuitive processes of an architectural education? The term cinema - whether it means the discipline and industry of film making or whether it is the architecture of a place of entertainment - evokes diverse concepts and images. These include illusions of time and space, the sense of seeing more than one reality at the same time; and of existing at the intersection of art and technology. This thesis argues that these related concepts and images can be distilled from cinema and other established disciplines, and adapted into a common aesthetic for hypermedia. The thesis posits a chronotopic theory with respect to the computer-human interface, whose integral imaginative mechanism is the click-jump of the user interface device. Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotopic event is borrowed from literary theory to describe the progression and development of time and space as they intersect (Bakhtin 1937). It is argued that this moment of the man-machine coordinated action is the act which puts imaginative control of the learning process into the hands of the learner and thus becomes the central vehicle of knowledge delivery. The theoretical underpinning for this argument refers to depictions of architecture as a space-time experience used by historian Sigfried Giedion (1941). The perception of the intuition as tacit knowledge is developed from Michael Polanyi (1969), and the conclusions of cognitive psychologist Allan Paivio and others provide an educational principle of dual processing as a model for learning by hypermedia (Paivio 1986).The writings of Paul Ricoeur (1988) on the nature of a meaning for narrative which encompasses both time and space along one horizon in which the traveller - in this case the student architect - arrives at perceptive understanding in their learning The thesis is a retrospective reporting and a critical examination of HyperSteel. This is a hypermedia application for architectural education intended to function as a learning bridge between structural knowledge-acquisition and intuitive use. It is one of many parallel developments in software design that have occurred around the world in the last decade (Mitchell 1991). Hypermedia is a set of procedures applied to computer aided learning that is based upon interactive software, typically Apple Computer's Hypercard©, and its successors. How can this medium with its strongly cinematographic characteristics best be used in the imaginative and intuitive processes of an architectural education? The term cinema - whether it means the discipline and industry of film making or whether it is the architecture of a place of entertainment - evokes diverse concepts and images. These include illusions of time and space, the sense of seeing more than one reality at the same time; and of existing at the intersection of art and technology. This thesis argues that these related concepts and images can be distilled from cinema and other established disciplines, and adapted into a common aesthetic for hypermedia. The thesis posits a chronotopic theory with respect to the computer-human interface, whose integral imaginative mechanism is the click-jump of the user interface device. Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotopic event is borrowed from literary theory to describe the progression and development of time and space as they intersect (Bakhtin 1937). It is argued that this moment of the man-machine coordinated action is the act which puts imaginative control of the learning process into the hands of the learner and thus becomes the central vehicle of knowledge delivery. The theoretical underpinning for this argument refers to depictions of architecture as a space-time experience used by historian Sigfried Giedion (1941). The perception of the intuition as tacit knowledge is developed from Michael Polanyi (1969), and the conclusions of cognitive psychologist Allan Paivio and others provide an educational principle of dual processing as a model for learning by hypermedia (Paivio 1986).The writings of Paul Ricoeur (1988) on the nature of a meaning for narrative which encompasses both time and space along one horizon in which the traveller - in this case the student architect - arrives at perceptive understanding in their learning process, will also inform this theoretical perspective. The intention of the thesis is- to identify, and theorise digital chronotopicity as it functions in architecture education. My conclusion is that there is a role for the media practitioner and theorist in making interactive software tools effective in the context of computer technologies and architecture education.

The thesis is an attempt to find whether there is any perceived or actual correlation between people (personal characteristics, or characteristics of subgroups) and the environments they choose--in particular, their houses; that is, to correlate identifiable physical aspects of environment with various identifiable personal or social characteristics, and to attempt to explain why such correlations occur; thence to postulate theories which will enable environments to be designed to be acceptable to particular groups of people. "The thesis", part 1 of the thesis, is a theoretical statement comprising, in Chapter I, an explicit statement of the theoretical framework in the form of five premises derived from philosophy and theories of psychology, art and architecture, and sociology. And, in Chapter II, a statement of the two hypotheses (that dwelling environments are perceived as "meaning" the people who live in them and that people choose dwelling environments, other things being equal, according to their concept of the kind of people they are) and the assumptions necessary to test them. In Part 2: "The Research Method" Chapter III covers the development of the measure of closure in dwelling environments. Closure was chosen in Chapter II as the environmental variable to be used for the purposes of this study. The final measure comprises five sets of four bird’s eye view perspective line drawings depicting five situations in a typical house in which closure is varied in four steps from very open to very closed. Chapter IV describes the development of the measure of household identity. The measure of household identity was developed especially to be of relevance to the choice of degrees of closure in dwelling environments. The measure is derived from actual verbal responses of the respondents to open ended questions asked in pilot studies. In Chapter V, the last chapter in Part 2, the research design of the survey study is described: the research model used, the design of the questionnaire, and the sampling method. The first chapter of Part 3: "The Results and Discussion of the Results", Chapter VI, presents the sample size (610) and shows that the sample is representative of the population of the Auckland greater urban area. In Chapter VII, the results relating to hypothesis I are presented and discussed. The results weakly support the hypothesis but the correlations are not of sufficient strength to be used predictively. In Chapter VIII the results of hypothesis 2 are presented and discussed. These results also support the hypothesis but even less strongly so than for hypothesis 1. Chapter VIII also covers sub-hypothesis 1, that people choose dwelling environments according to their "objective” household identity, In Chapter IX the results of the hypotheses are compared and summarized. And in Chapter X the implications of the results are outlined: an attempt is made to relative the results to the theoretical framework and from this implications for a possible theory of aesthetics are drawn. The implications of the results for the theory and practice of architecture are delineated and finally suggestions for future research are outlined.