Sustainable tourism development in remote regions? Questions arising from research in the North Kimberley,Australia

This paper is concerned with the sustainable development of a self-drive tourist destination in the remote region in Northern Australia. It first compares officially used data on visitor profiles to the information collected in the survey. Differences between data collected and available secondary data imply that tourism planning should include collection of region-specific tourism information to guide and mitigate potential environmental changes. Natural landscape features are the key attraction for visitors to the region. Visitor satisfaction levels with the current state of the destination are high. However, local residents reported perceived negative impacts of tourism, in particular on amenities and the ecology of the landscape. Visitors also reported behavior that might contribute to environmental impacts. Implications of the findings, in the context of future destination planning, are discussed.     

Seeking,Thinking, Acting: Understanding Suburban Resident Perceptions and Behaviors Related to Stream Quality

Theories in risk, psychology, and communication suggest aiming to inform the public about basic ecological facts may not be enough to influence knowledge of risks or behaviors to mitigate water quality risks. The risk information‐seeking and processing model and the theory of planned behavior suggest several additional variables that are likely to influence risk‐mitigating behaviors. We used data from a survey of watershed residents in Ohio to explore a model of behavioral intentions to positively impact stream health. Residents' informational norms, or the perceived pressure to know about local stream health, strongly predicted their information‐seeking behaviors. Active‐seeking behaviors predicted positive attitudes toward behaviors impacting stream health, which predicted intentions to positively impact stream health. Implications for outreach include couching communication in terms of risk found important to the local community, here wildlife were seen as negatively influenced by water quality, as opposed to plain reports typically provided by utility companies. Increasing social pressure to feel informed by emphasizing the existing knowledge of stream ecology among residents could change the norm for the less informed. A low response rate limits the generalizability of findings here, but leveraging these findings in outreach efforts could prove more successful in engaging the public to improve stream health and support policies to improve stream health.     

Could wastewater analysis be a useful tool for China? — A review

Analysingwastewater samples is an innovative approach that overcomesmany limitations of traditional surveys to identify and measure a range of chemicals that were consumed by or exposed to people living in a sewer catchment area. First conceptualised in 2001, much progress has been made to make wastewater analysis (WWA) a reliable and robust tool for measuring chemical consumption and/or exposure. At the moment, the most popular application of WWA, sometimes referred as sewage epidemiology, is to monitor the consumption of illicit drugs in communities around the globe, including China. The approach has been largely adopted by lawenforcement agencies as a device tomonitor the temporal and geographical patterns of drug consumption. In the future, themethodology can be extended to other chemicals including biomarkers of population health (e.g. environmental or oxidative stress biomarkers, lifestyle indicators or medications that are taken by different demographic groups) and pollutants that people are exposed to (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, perfluorinated chemicals, and toxic pesticides). The extension of WWA to a huge range of chemicals may give rise to a field called sewage chemical-information mining (SCIM) with unexplored potentials. China has many densely populated cities with thousands of sewage treatment plants which are favourable for applying WWA/SCIM in order to help relevant authorities gather information about illicit drug consumption and population health status. However, there are some prerequisites and uncertainties of the methodology that should be addressed for SCIM to reach its full potential in China.     

Sex ratio and optimal harvest of canvasback ducks,A model

The North American population of canvasback ducks (Aythya valisineria) exhibits extreme distortion of the sex ratio in favor of males. This paper describes a model which accounts for this pattern by relatively heavier female mortality in both the breeding and nonbreeding seasons. The density-dependence of winter mortality leads to the conclusion that the observed sex ratio depresses total population numbers. Variation in nesting success is shown to influence sex ratios and strongly depress population numbers. Because a standard harvest scheme can be demonstrated to severely depress the numbers of ducks, an alternative graduated or weighted harvest procedure is recommended.     

Strategies for determining soil-loss tolerance

Excessive soil losses due to erosion or lateral displacement by machinery impair productivity. Some soil loss is tolerable, but not so much that plant productivity diminishes. Thus productivity is the dominant concern in determining soil-loss tolerance. The effects of soil loss on productivity, however, are difficult to determine. Therefore, two alternatives are discussed for determining the limits of soil loss, or soil-loss tolerance. These alternatives are the maintenance of soil organic matter and, for shallow and moderately deep soils, the maintenance of soil depth. They are not new strategies, but our rapidly increasing knowledge of the dynamics of soil organic matter and the rates of soil formation from bedrock or consolidated sediments warrants the reconsideration of these alternatives. Reductions in either soil organic matter or the depth of shallow or moderately deep soils will lead to declining productivity. Soil organic matter, considered to be a surrogate for productivity, is much easier to monitor than is productivity. Also, there are many computer models for predicting the effects of management on soil organic matter. Recently compiled data on rates of soil formation suggest that soil losses of 1 t/a (2.24 Mg/ha yr) are greater than the rate of replenishment by the weathering of lithic or paralithic material in all but very wet climates.