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Biodiversity is confronted globally by multiple stressors. Environmental policies must regulate these stressors to achieve targets, but how should that be done when the outcomes of limits on one stressor are contingent on other stressors, about which there is imperfect knowledge? Deriving regulatory frameworks that incorporate these contingencies is an emerging challenge at the science–policy interface. To be fit for implementation, these frameworks need to facilitate the inherently sociopolitical process of policy implementation and account transparently for uncertainty, such that practitioners and other stakeholders can more realistically anticipate the range of potential outcomes to policy. We developed an approach to quantify stressor limits that explicitly accounts for multistressor contingencies. Using an invertebrate data set collected over 30 years throughout New Zealand, we combined ecological and ecotoxicological models to predict biodiversity loss as a function of one stressor, treating multistressor contingencies as a form of uncertainty about the outcomes of limits on that stressor. We transparently accounted for that uncertainty by presenting regulatory limits as bands bounded between optimistic and pessimistic views that practitioners may have about the local context within which limits are applied. In addition to transparently accounting for uncertainties, our framework also leaves room for practitioners to build stakeholder consensus when refining limits to suit different local contexts. A criticism of this open, transparent approach is that it creates too much scope for choosing limits that are lenient on polluters, paralyzing on‐the‐ground management of multiple stressors, but we demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates of temporal trends in species' occupancy are essential for conservation policy and planning, but limitations to the data and models often result in very high trend uncertainty. A critical source of uncertainty that degrades scientific credibility is that caused by disagreement among studies or models. Modelers are aware of this uncertainty but usually only partially estimate it and communicate it to decision makers. At the same time, there is growing awareness that full disclosure of uncertainty is critical for effective translation of science into policies and plans. But what are the most effective approaches to estimating uncertainty and communicating uncertainty to decision makers? We explored how alternative approaches to estimating and communicating uncertainty of species trends could affect decisions concerning conservation status of freshwater fishes. We used ensemble models to propagate trend uncertainty within and among models and communicated this uncertainty with categorical distributions of trend direction and magnitude. All approaches were designed to fit an established decision‐making system used to assign species conservation status by the New Zealand government. Our results showed how approaches that failed to fully disclose uncertainty, while simplifying the information presented, could hamper species conservation or lead to ineffective decisions. We recommend an approach that was recently used effectively to communicate trend uncertainty to a panel responsible for setting the conservation status of New Zealand's freshwater fishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bath (UK) is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. Walking the Names (2019–21) was a cycle of slow participatory walks reading the names of those who had died of poverty in the Bath Union Workhouse. The site-specific work took place in the burial ground of the nineteenth-century institution where the dead were buried in unmarked graves. The paper reviews the project in the context of the emergence of uneasy memories and silenced voices in the contested spaces of Bath's memory landscape. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as 'wounded', the essay explores a co-creative process of embodied critical re-memorialisation generating contemporary resonances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a walking and multi-media arts project seeking to renew agency in Holocaust testimony and generate contemporary resonances. Forced Walks is a programme of speculative, socially engaged experiments, initiated by artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein. Honouring Esther (2015–2017), the first Forced Walks project, walked the route of a Nazi Death March digitally transposed to Somerset (UK), subsequently retracing it in Lower Saxony, Germany. The project engaged walkers in co-creating an immanent reflective space materialized in mark-making, social media and installation. An emergent hybrid somatic/digital process, 'making the return' in a specific Holocaust context, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emergent walking arts approach is presented as an opening towards social repair. Drawing on an intra-disciplinary project, 'sense-ing' legacies of slave-ownership in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath (UK), an iteration of walking-with is discussed in the context of 'pedagogies of discomfort'. Walkers on the Sweet Waters project, hosted by the author, participated in a research-creation process agitating thought and extending resonances through mark making and social media trails. The article explores strategies of curated juxtaposition and dissonance as provocations to involuntary thought and empathic response. A participatory, performative walking is outlined accessing embodied ways of knowing and the agencies of walkers and heritage. Walkers become story carriers and 'affect aliens', unsettling heritage accounts, breaking silences and revealing the disappeared. Reflecting on a creative-critical intervention on 'authorized' heritage the article presents a somatic approach to learning, heritage and social justice through walking arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and pilot study of an instrument used to characterize student perceptions of science are discussed. The instrument contains 27 statements that are categorized by students as to degree of accuracy. (MP)

Differences in population density between species of varying size are frequently attributed to metabolic rates which are assumed to scale with body size with a slope of 0.75. This assumption is often criticised on the grounds that 0.75 scaling of metabolic rate with body size is not universal and can vary significantly depending on species and life-history. However, few studies have investigated how interspecific variation in metabolic scaling relationships affects population density in different sized species. Here we predict inter-specific differences in metabolism from niche requirements, thereby allowing metabolic predictions of species distribution and abundance at fine spatial scales. Due to the differences in energetic efficiency required along harsh-benign gradients, an extremophile fish (brown mudfish, Neochanna apoda) living in harsh environments had slower metabolism, and thus higher population densities, compared to a fish species (banded kōkopu, Galaxias fasciatus) in physiologically more benign habitats. Interspecific differences in the intercepts for the relationship between body and density disappeared when species mass-specific metabolic rates, rather than body sizes, were used to predict density, implying population energy use was equivalent between mudfish and kōkopu. Nevertheless, despite significant interspecific differences in the slope of the metabolic scaling relationships, mudfish and kōkopu had a common slope for the relationship between body size and population density. These results support underlying logic of energetic equivalence between different size species implicit in metabolic theory. However, the precise slope of metabolic scaling relationships, which is the subject of much debate, may not be a reliable indicator of population density as expected under metabolic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because smaller habitats dry more frequently and severely during droughts, habitat size is likely a key driver of survival in populations during climate change and associated increased extreme drought frequency. Here, we show that survival in populations during droughts is a threshold function of habitat size driven by an interaction with population density in metapopulations of the forest pool dwelling fish, Neochanna apoda. A mark-recapture study involving 830 N. apoda individuals during a one-in-seventy-year extreme drought revealed that survival during droughts was high for populations occupying pools deeper than 139 mm, but declined steeply in shallower pools. This threshold was caused by an interaction between increasing population density and drought magnitude associated with decreasing habitat size, which acted synergistically to increase physiological stress and mortality. This confirmed two long-held hypotheses, firstly concerning the interactive role of population density and physiological stress, herein driven by habitat size, and secondly, the occurrence of drought survival thresholds. Our results demonstrate how survival in populations during droughts will depend strongly on habitat size and highlight that minimum habitat size thresholds will likely be required to maximize survival as the frequency and intensity of droughts are projected to increase as a result of global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]