Our changing city: Sydney - a census overview 2001-2006

The 2006 Census provides an opportunity to view a snapshot of Sydney in its current state of flux. This report presents the first detailed suburb-by-suburb analysis of social changes in Sydney between 2001 and 2006. A major innovation for the 2006 Census is the ability to chart changes at the suburb level between the two censuses. Before now, the only realistic scale at which change could be analysed and mapped was the local government or Statistical District scale. Arguably, the suburb offers a geographical scale that more people can relate to. Less remote than that of a local government area, and more coherent than the much smaller scale Census Collection District, the suburb is somewhere we can identify as a place where we liv

Jellyfish on the menu: mtDNA assay reveals scyphozoan predation in the Irish Sea

Localized outbreaks of jellyfish, known as blooms, cause a variety of adverse ecological and economic effects. However, fundamental aspects of their ecology remain unknown. Notably, there is scant information on the role jellyfish occupy in food webs: in many ecosystems, few or no predators are known. To identify jellyfish consumers in the Irish Sea, we conducted a molecular gut content assessment of 50 potential predators using cnidarian-specific mtDNA primers and sequencing. We show that jellyfish predation may be more common than previously acknowledged: uncovering many previously unknown jellyfish predators. A substantial proportion of herring and whiting were found to have consumed jellyfish. Rare ingestion was also detected in a variety of other species. Given the phenology of jellyfish in the region, we suggest that the predation was probably targeting juvenile stages of the jellyfish life cycle

How quantitative is metabarcoding: a meta-analytical approach

Metabarcoding has been used in a range of ecological applications such as taxonomic assignment, dietary analysis, and the analysis of environmental DNA. However, after a decade of use in these applications there is little consensus on the extent to which proportions of reads generated corresponds to the original proportions of species in a community. To quantify our current understanding we conducted a structured review and meta‐analysis. The analysis suggests that a weak quantitative relationship may exist between the biomass and sequences produced (slope = 0.52 ±0.34, p<0.01), albeit it with a large degree of uncertainty. None of the tested moderators: sequencing platform type, the number of species used in a trial, or the source of DNA were able to explain the variance. Our current understanding of the factors affecting the quantitative performance of metabarcoding is still limited: additional research is required before metabarcoding can be confidently utilised for quantitative applications. Until then, we advocate the inclusion of mock communities when metabarcoding as this facilitates direct assessment of the quantitative ability of any given study

Value switching: Extracting profit from the city

Land and property, and the wealth extracted from it, has reappeared as a central concern in understanding the process of urbanisation under capitalism. Much of the academic discussion centres on the re-emergence of ‘rentier capitalism’ drawing on 19th-century concepts of land economics. However, the accumulation of wealth through property ownership and the development process points towards a value proposition contained in the land question that is not satisfactorily explained by notions of ‘rent’ or ‘rentier’ capitalism, rooted as they are on 19th-century concepts of the land development process. This article seeks to extend this debate by exploring multiple regimes of value that underpin the contemporary urban development process. The first part of the article maps out four intersecting regimes of land value, before arguing by reference to empirical analysis of land and property sales data in Sydney Australia that switching between these value regimes – value switching – is a key transformative moment in the urban development process. Specifically, this article argues that value switching, as triggered by the land use planning process, has become the key driver of urban development dynamics and adds a further dimension to theories on land and housing development in the financialised city

Inclusion of jellyfish in 30+ years of Ecopath with Ecosim models

A review of the functional role of jellyfish in Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) models by Pauly et al. [Pauly, D., Graham, W., Libralato, S., Morissette, L., and Deng Palomares, M. L. 2009. Jellyfish in ecosystems, online databases, and ecosystem models. Hydrobiologia, 616: 67–85.] a decade ago concluded that recreation of jellyfish population dynamics in models required additional ecological research and the careful consideration of their unique biology during model construction. Here, amidst calls for ecosystem-based management and the growing recognition of jellyfishes' role in foodwebs, we investigate how jellyfish are implemented in EwE models and identify areas requiring improvement. Over time, an increasing percentage of models have included jellyfish. Jellyfish were often linked to the wider ecosystem, with many predators and prey included in models. However, ecotrophic efficiency, a measure of the extent to which they are used by higher trophic levels, was frequently set at low values, suggesting that jellyfish are still perceived as under-utilized components of the ecosystem. Moving forward, greater care should be taken to differentiate the functional roles played by ctenophores, cnidarians, and pelagic tunicates. Additionally, when feasible, early life stages should be incorporated as multi-stanza groups to more accurately depict jellyfishes' complex life cycle

Understanding the lived experience and benefits of regional cities

This study investigates the lived experience of regional city residents to: understand how the benefits and disadvantages of regional city life are perceived; and explore attitudes towards population growth. • The study involved interviewing residents and policy stakeholders in five regional cities across Australia: Albury-Wodonga (Vic/NSW), Cairns (Qld), Mildura (Vic), Whyalla (SA) and Wollongong (NSW). • The case studies reflect a broad range of different regional city circumstances and issues, including remoteness, industrial strengths, population trends, size and environmental vulnerabilities. • Key benefits of regional city living were housing types and affordability, community connections, access to nature, and the ease of travel within the city, particularly work commutes. • Reduced employment and career development options were seen as a downside of relocating to regional cities, particularly for private sector workers. In some sectors, the lower incomes available in regional cities also reduced the economic benefits of lower housing costs. • Other disadvantages of regional living included lack of access to specialised services (particularly health services) and major city events, as well as concerns about limited public transport. • Many regional residents questioned whether population growth would benefit them, as it was likely to affect the amenity and lifestyle-based benefits they valued. By contrast, policy stakeholders were more optimistic about growth, seeing it as opening up new opportunities. • Many residents (and some policy stakeholders) perceived that policies relating to regional areas were made by metropolitan decision-makers, and were not always informed by sufficient local knowledge. • The findings highlight the need for regional population growth to be designed to benefit regional cities and their residents, as opposed to being perceived as something that happens to regional cities, to which they can merely react. • Regional population growth needs to be supported by long-term strategic planning that addresses specific and place-based development goals for regional cities. This will help to ensure that any growth is of benefit to regional communities, and can reflect the wide variations and diversity in regional conditions. Key findings This research into the lived experience of regional city residents raises questions about the implications of population growth for Australia’s regions. The five case studies provide insights into why people choose to live in regional cities, their views on what population growth may mean for them, and whether this growth may impact their preference for regional city living. Cheaper housing, access to nature and open spaces, friendly communities and the comparative ease of local travel were all seen as key positives of living in regional cities, including by metropolitan migrants. While some shared experiences and concerns emerged from the five cases, there was also variation across the cities, providing further evidence of the different circumstances across regional Australia. For example, Whyalla residents see population growth as vital for the city’s ongoing viability given a declining population. In contrast, ongoing growth was often questioned by residents of Cairns, Mildura and Albury-Wodonga due to concerns about diminishing amenity and additional demands on existing services. Wollongong respondents were conscious of the city’s growing integration with Sydney, with concerns focused on housing affordability and whether continued growth was sustainable. These variations offer support for arguments in favour of place-based policies for regional city growth that are able to respond to specific local circumstances and development goals. Three main themes were shared across the case studies. First, regional residents were concerned about growth diminishing the lifestyle appeal of their cities. Even in Whyalla, where residents saw population growth as important to the city’s ongoing viability, residents suggested that there was a limit to how much growth the city could handle before it would diminish amenity. Participants used phrases such as ‘village feel’ and ‘small town’ to encapsulate the lifestyle they value and why they are reticent about growth. This sense of disquiet indicates that regional growth policies need to show how population growth will benefit regional communities, rather than be something that just happens to them. Second, the concern regarding population growth was evident in participant views on essential services. Many participants were frustrated with existing levels of service provision and raised concerns about the likelihood of increasing demands on health and education as a result of population growth. This indicates that residents see governments as unlikely to provide the additional investment needed to manage growth effectively. Recurring examples included reports of an undersupply of general practitioners across regional Australia, and limited access to specialised services in both health and education. The latter was a particularly pronounced issue in remote locations due to the time and costs of travel to major cities, where these services predominate. Third, affordable and spacious housing and house blocks were seen as an essential element of regional city living, and are of considerable appeal to residents arriving from the larger cities, particularly young families. The availability of this traditional housing offer in regional cities was seen as a crucial part of maintaining the appeal of regional living for some participants. However, the difference between metropolitan and regional housing costs was felt to have lessened as a result of regional population growth during COVID-19. Participants also noted that while regional housing markets are often more affordable, it is not always possible to maintain income levels when moving from a major metropolitan area to a regional city. Some participants who had relocated from metropolitan areas found they had to adjust their expectations of work and career when faced with regional labour markets. While some regional stakeholders related how they had built a successful career in local government or the health sector in regional cities, others referred to adjusting expectations, ‘parking their ego’ and also to planning a return to metropolitan areas in response to employment and career opportunities. This made assessments of the greater affordability benefits of regional living versus metropolitan living more complex than they might initially appear. These key findings from the research indicate challenges for policy makers responsible for regional population growth policies. For pro-growth policies to be well-received in regional areas, it is essential that they are perceived as beneficial by local residents. There is already a perception amongst regional communities that growth will diminish key aspects of their lived experience: the small town feel and community connections. The research also indicates that a primary focus for growth policy should be on improving regional labour markets, which would then attract population. This extends further than providing more jobs, and includes the need to consider how long-term career aspirations can be fulfilled in non-metropolitan Australia. More broadly, the findings indicate that policy making needs to be approached from a regional perspective, with the goal of making regional Australia an attractive place to live and work, rather than approached as a solution to metropolitan population pressures. Policy development options As stated above, a key insight from the research is the importance of making clear what the benefits of population growth are for regional cities and communities. Translated into policy recommendations, this means it is important to clearly define what problems are being addressed by regional population growth. The difference between current metropolitan and regional city populations means there is limited capacity for regional population redistribution to significantly minimise metropolitan population pressures, at least in the short- to medium-term. The focus, therefore, should be on how population growth may address regional issues. A second key policy recommendation is to adopt long-term strategic planning for regional Australia, including consideration of the economic and social roles that regional cities play in the national settlement system. Planning for regional growth will ensure that benefits from additional population (e.g. better services and stronger economies) can be realised, while minimising the diseconomies of scale and the impact on the ‘village feel’ of regional cities. Demonstrated long-term commitments to goal-oriented plans may also address the reticence of regional residents towards population growth, by making clear the benefits and providing assurance that they will be realised. The variations between regional cities affirms previous recommendations for place-based policies for regional city growth and development. While five case studies cannot be representative of all regional cities in Australia, the evidence from the places included in this research underscores the importance of policies responding to individual circumstances and goals. This extends the focus on regional problem solving discussed above, as it suggests that these problems are location specific, not generic to all regional areas. The lived experience of regional residents also provides insights for policy that may serve to attract migrants from major cities in Australia. A key motivator for regional relocation is an existing connection to the regional city, including family, friends and previous tourism-based experiences in the area. As noted above, the major concern reported was employment, with the quality of jobs and prospects for career development seen as a shortcoming of regional cities. This was particularly the case for people who had relocated from major cities and worked in the private sector. The lower wages on offer were also seen to diminish the advantage of cheaper housing in regional cities. Other disadvantages metropolitan migrants encountered were reduced access to entertainment and sporting events, and the challenges some new residents encountered establishing friendships, networks and connections in regional cities. This indicates that regional attraction policy needs to be seen as a comparison between the migration destination and origin cities. Policy should also target people whose stage-of-life most closely aligns with the attractions of larger housing, community activities and easier commutes, such as young families. The research also indicates a limited capacity for smaller cities to substantially affect population-related issues in Australia, even as the COVID-19 pandemic has stalled international migration and thus national population growth. Issues associated with population growth have been felt most acutely in the capital cities, particularly Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The significant difference in the population of those cities in comparison to smaller regional cities underscores the limited effect regional relocations may have. Based on the evidence from Wollongong, population growth in locations close to metropolitan centres seems to be transferring metropolitan growth issues to regional cities, increasing housing costs and congestion in particular. Therefore, population settlement policies needs to tackle these issues, while also benefitting the parts of regional Australia where population is stagnant or in decline, such as Whyalla. For the national settlement structure, an underlying issue indicated by this research is that the gap between Australia’s major cities and smaller cities means that there are few ‘middle ground’ options available, which could provide both diverse career opportunities and the lifestyle and housing benefits of regional areas. The study Inquiry This research is part of a wider AHURI Inquiry into population growth in Australia’s smaller cities. The Inquiry responds to two overarching research questions: 1. What is the capacity of Australia’s smaller cities to assist in managing national population growth, including international and national migration?

A feeding guild indicator to assess environmental change impacts on marine ecosystem structure and functioning.

Integrating food web indicators into ecological status assessments is central to developing effective management measures that can improve degraded ecosystems. This is because they can reveal how ecosystems respond to environmental change that cannot be inferred from studying habitat, species or assemblages alone. However, the substantial investment required to monitor food webs (e.g. via stomach contents analysis) and the lack of internationally agreed approaches to assessing them has hampered their development. Inventories of trophic interactions have been collated world-wide and across biomes, and can be applied to infer food web structure and energy flow. Here, we compile a new marine dataset containing 8,092 unique predator–prey interactions from 415,294 fish stomachs. We demonstrate how feeding guilds (i.e. groupings based on diet and life stage) could be defined systematically and in a way that is conducive to their application internationally across ecosystems; and apply them to the North Sea fish assemblage to demonstrate their responsiveness to anthropogenic pressures. We found evidence for seven distinct feeding guilds. Differences between guilds were related to predator size, which positively correlated with piscivory, phylogeny, with multiple size classes of a species often in the same guild, and habitat, as pelagic, benthic and shallow-coastal foraging was apparent. Guild biomasses were largely consistent through time at the North Sea-level and spatially aggregated at the regional level with change relating to changes in resource availability, temperature, fishing and the biomass of other guilds. This suggests that fish biomass was partitioned across broad feeding and environmental niches, and changes over time were governed partly by guild carrying capacities, but also by a combination of covariates with contrasting patterns of change. Management of the North Sea ecosystem could therefore be adaptive and focused towards specific guilds and pressures in a given area. Synthesis and applications. We propose a food web indicator which has been explicitly called for to inform policy via food web status assessment as part of the European Union's Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the indicator toolkit supporting The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (the ‘OSPAR Convention’)

Coding Early Naturalists' Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000)

The understanding of fish communities' changes over the past centuries has important implications for conservation policy and marine resource management. However, reconstructing these changes is difficult because information on marine communities before the second half of the 20th century is, in most cases, anecdotal and merely qualitative. Therefore, historical qualitative records and modern quantitative data are not directly comparable, and their integration for long-term analyses is not straightforward. We developed a methodology that allows the coding of qualitative information provided by early naturalists into semi-quantitative information through an intercalibration with landing proportions. This approach allowed us to reconstruct and quantitatively analyze a 200-year-long time series of fish community structure indicators in the Northern Adriatic Sea (Mediterranean Sea). Our analysis provides evidence of long-term changes in fish community structure, including the decline of Chondrichthyes, large-sized and late-maturing species. This work highlights the importance of broadening the time-frame through which we look at marine ecosystem changes and provides a methodology to exploit, in a quantitative framework, historical qualitative sources. To the purpose, naturalists' eyewitness accounts proved to be useful for extending the analysis on fish community back in the past, well before the onset of field-based monitoring programs

The clinical profile of tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in the United Kingdom: A retrospective cohort study in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD)

AbstractBackgroundTuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) is a multi-system genetic disorder characterised by the development of benign growths and diverse clinical manifestations, varying in severity, age at onset and with high clinical burden.AimsThis longitudinal study aims to describe the broad spectrum of clinical manifestation profiles in a large, representative cohort of TSC patients in the UK in order to better understand disease complexity.MethodsTSC patients in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and linked Hospital Episodes Statistics (CPRD-HES) were retrospectively identified between 1987 and 2013. Available history was extracted for each patient and clinical diagnosis, procedure and medication records reviewed. A random selection of patients from the CPRD-HES was used as a Comparator cohort.ResultsThree hundred and thirty-four TSC patients with a mean (SD) age of 30.3 (18.6) years were identified (53% female). TSC was diagnosed at mean age 3.2 (4.2) years. Epilepsy and psychiatric manifestations were reported frequently in paediatric (77% and 55%, respectively) and adult patients (66% and 68%, respectively). The prevalence of manifestations in the TSC cohort was markedly higher versus the Comparator cohort. The majority of paediatric (46%) and adult TSC patients (62%) developed clinical manifestations affecting at least three organ systems and forty-nine distinctive organ system manifestation profiles were identified.ConclusionsTSC patients present with multiple and complex clinical manifestations and profiles that necessitate the co-ordinated action of a multidisciplinary team in order to improve the quality and efficiency of care

“The Education System is Broken:” The Influence of a Sociocultural Foundations Class on the Perspectives and Practices of Physical Education Preservice Teachers

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of one sociocultural foundations class taught by Florence, a teacher educator, on the perspectives and practices of two physical education preservice teachers (PTs), Michael and Bob. Within a narrative inquiry approach, data sources were nonparticipant observation, intraviews, conversations, exit slips, digital interactions, responses to three fictional physical education teaching scenarios, a fictional curriculum outline, three stimulated recall interviews, documents, and various forms of visual data. Theoretical thematic analysis was employed to work with and make sense of the data. Findings indicated that both PTs faced frustration and discomfort during class. Nevertheless, the class resonated and raised the PTs’ critical awareness of sociocultural issues related to physical education. Key reasons for the apparent success of the class were the deinstitutionalizing pedagogical methods employed by Florence and Florence’s “problem-posing” education which prompted the PTs to question their perspectives and assumptions about society and culture