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Earth’s tropical savannas typically support high biomass of diverse grazing herbivores that depend on a highly fluctuating resource: high-quality forage. An annual wet–dry cycle, fire and herbivory combine to influence forage quality and availability throughout the year. In the savannas of northern Australia, a depauperate suite of large native (marsupial) herbivores (wallaroos [Osphranter spp.] and the agile wallaby [Notamacropus agilis]) compete for resources with non-native large herbivores introduced in the late nineteenth century, particularly bovines (feral and managed cattle [Bos spp.] and feral water buffalo [Bubalus bubalis]) that now dominate the landscape. Anecdotal reports of recent population declines of large macropods and negative impacts of bovines highlight the need to better understand the complex relationship between forage, fire and abundance of native and introduced large herbivores. The pyric herbivory conceptual model, which posits complex feedbacks between fire and herbivory and was developed outside Australia, predicts that native and introduced large herbivores will both respond positively to post-fire forage production in Australian savannas where they co-occur. We used grazing exclosures, forage biomass and nutrient analyses and motion-sensor camera-trapping to evaluate the overall robustness of the pyric herbivory model in the Australian context, specifically whether forage quantity and quality are impacted by herbivory, season and fire activity, and which forage attributes most influence large grazing herbivore abundance. Forage quantity, as measured by live, dead and total herbaceous biomass and proportion of biomass alive, was higher inside herbivore exclosures, even at relatively low densities of herbivores. Forage quality, as measured by fibre content, was not affected by herbivory, however, crude protein content of live herbaceous biomass was greater outside herbivore exclosures. Recent fire was an important predictor of all measures of forage quantity and quality. Recent fire occurrence decreased overall quantity (biomass) but increased quality (decreased fibre content and increased crude protein content); late dry season fires resulted in forage with the highest crude protein content. The predictions of the pyric herbivory conceptual model are consistent with observations of the feeding behaviour of introduced bovines and some large macropods in northern Australian savannas, lending support to the global generality of pyric herbivory in fire-prone grassy biomes.

Background Information campaigns about bushfire preparedness are often based on the assumption that residents of bushfire-prone neighbourhoods underestimate their risk. However, there are complex relationships between bushfire hazard, perceived risk and adaptive action. Aims We investigate how residents’ understanding of bushfire risk relates to biophysical risk in the City of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia’s most fire-prone state capital. Methods A transdisciplinary case study using a survey of 406 residents living close to the wildland–urban interface, focus groups in four bushfire-prone neighbourhoods, and geospatial fire risk assessment. Key results Neighbourhood concern about bushfire is statistically associated with biophysical measurement of local bushfire risk. This awareness does not necessarily translate into adaptive action, in part because residents underestimate the risk to their homes from fuels on their own property and overestimate the risk from bushland and neighbouring properties, leading to a common response that preparing for bushfire is futile if your neighbours do not also prepare. Neighbourhoods with high levels of positive community interaction, however, are more likely to access preparedness information, and develop fire-adaptive behaviours. Conclusions/Implications Our findings highlight the need for social adaptation pathways using local communication interventions to build the neighbourhood knowledge, networks and capacities that enable community-led bushfire preparedness.

The Black Summer bushfires (2019-2020) cost the Australian economy over 100 billion dollars and burnt a total of 18 million hectares. In just one season, around 20% of Australia's Eucalyptus forests burnt down and billions of animals perished. Recent catastrophic fires in Australia and North America have made scientists and policymakers question how the disruption of First Nations' burning practices has impacted fuel loads. For instance, we have learnt from modern Australian Indigenous communities, historical literature, and art works that Indigenous peoples have used cultural burning to rejuvenate patches of land and preserve open vegetation for hunting and cultural purposes. The advent of British invasion brought a change in the type of fire regimes and landscape management across much of the continent, which may have led to an increase in flammable fuels in forest settings. However, the actual degree of land-cover modification by early settlers has only been often debated in the academic literature and within management stakeholders.The quantification of past land cover is needed to address such debates. Pollen is the key proxy to track past vegetation changes, but pollen spectra suffer from some important biases e.g. taphonomy, pollen productivity, dispersal capability. Estimating past vegetation cover from sedimentary pollen composition requires to correct for productivity and dispersal biases using empirical-based models of the pollen-vegetation relationship. Such models for quantitative vegetation reconstruction (e.g. REVEALS) have yet been mostly applied in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 15 years - here we present recent applications of this methodology from Australia. We show the quantification of land cover changes through pre- and post- British invasion on multiple records (n=51) across the southeastern Australian region. This represents the first regional application of REVEALS within the Australian continent.We provide the first empirical evidence that the regional landscape before British invasion was a cultural landscape with limited tree cover as it was maintained by Indigenous Australians through cultural burning. Our findings suggest that the removal of Indigenous vegetation management has altered woodland fuel structure and that much of the region was predominantly open before colonial invasion. The post-colonial land modification has resonance in wildfire occurrence and management under the pressing challenges posed by climate change.

The fragmented nature of the rainforest archipelago in Australia, and the environmental constraints associated with it, have been a major focus of my research over the last twenty years. This thesis is my contribution to the problem. It includes a book and 53 scientific articles. The book is my synthesis of the available evidence. The scientific articles are my research contribution to the issue, based mainly on field studies in Tasmania and the monsoonal tropics of Western Australia, Queensland and throughout the Northern Territory. I began this research as a post-graduate student at the University of Tasmania, but most was conducted whilst I was a wildlife ecologist with the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. The book was written during a one-year fellowship at Harvard University and was finalised in my capacity as a Principal Research Fellow at the Northern Territory University. Three articles (marked in bold in Table 1) are based on work I undertook for my Botany honours degree at the University of Tasmania. I have not previously submitted any other work included in this thesis for any other degree. I am the sole author of the book and eleven of the 53 articles.

Historical video games set in famous places in the world history have grown in popularity. The current study extends prior work in analyzing how social realism (a dimension of perceived realism focused on regarding game characters and events as authentic) is related to entertainment outcomes, assessing the extent to which sense of place further contributes to these outcomes, and examining how these experiences encourage tourism. As an internal replication, we surveyed international fans of the Assassin's Creed franchise about their experiences with one of four different games set in modern history (Unity, Syndicate) or antiquity ( Origins, Odyssey). For modern historical games, increased social realism was correlated with enjoyment and increased sense of place was correlated with appreciation. For all games, sense of place was positively associated with tourism intentions. These findings are discussed in relation to the role of perceived realism in the experience and influence of playing historical video games.

From their development in the early 1960s to their global prominence today, video games are an increasingly ubiquitous feature of entertainment culture. Likewise, video games and their supposed and actual effects on players feature prominently in public discourse and academic research. However, international scholarly outlets have largely omitted the Latin American experience with video games, despite the region’s sustained and growing gaming culture—in some cases, with gameplay rates that outpace regions that are more commonly featured in scholarship (such as the United States). This essay presents as a broad call for scholarship that directly engages with Latin American gamers and gaming culture, as part of larger efforts to move media communication research towards authentic and meaningful global engagement.

In the face of increasing public distrust for journalistic institutions, stories sourced from artificially intelligent (AI) journalists have the potential to lower hostile media bias by activating ...

A neglected dimension of the fire regime concept is fire patchiness. Habitat mosaics that emerge from the grain of burned and unburned patches (pyrodiversity) are critical for the persistence of a diverse range of plant and animal species. This issue is of particular importance in frequently burned tropical Eucalyptus savannas, where coarse fire mosaics have been hypothesized to have caused the recent drastic population declines of small mammals. Satellites routinely used for fire mapping in these systems are unable to accurately map fine-grained fire mosaics, frustrating our ability to determine whether declines in biodiversity are associated with local pyrodiversity. To advance this problem, we have developed a novel method (we call ‘double-differenced dNBR’) that combines the infrequent (c. bi-monthly) detailed spatial resolution Landsat with daily coarse scale coverage of MODIS and VIIRS to map pyrodiversity in the savannas of Kakadu National Park. We used seasonal Landsat mosaics and differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) to define burned areas, with a modification to dNBR that subtracts long-term average dNBR to increase contrast. Our results show this approach is effective in mapping fine-scale fire mosaics in the homogenous lowland savannas, although inappropriate for nearby heterogenous landscapes. Comparison of this methods to other fire metrics (e.g., area burned, seasonality) based on Landsat and MODIS imagery suggest this method is likely accurate and better at quantifying fine-scale patchiness of fire, albeit it demands detailed field validation.

World of Warcraft (WoW) Classic (released August 2019) allows players to return to the original game experience. This study considers how WoW players experience game content through media nostalgia and sense of place and investigates how social presence impacts these components of experience. Survey questions addressed 306 participants’ experiences in WoW, feelings of nostalgia and sense of place in Azeroth, and experiences with social presence in WoW; open-ended questions were asked about their motivations to play WoW. Prior overall WoW experience and higher sense of social presence increase personal nostalgia scores (replicating previous research). Sense of place scores increased with higher sense of social presence but were overall lower for current WoW Classic players. Social presence proved an important component of both personal nostalgia and sense of place. These findings expand and extend researchers’ understanding of the relationships between nostalgia, sense of place, and social presence within this unique site of study.

Supplemental files (stimulus materials and other study content) to accompany the published manuscript: Bowman, N. D., Knight, J., Schlue, L., & Cohen, E. (in press). What if it happened to me? Socially conscious music videos can address campus assault: Narrative comprehension and rape myth acceptance. Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

The connection between player and avatar is understood to be central to the experience and effects of massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming experiences, and these connections emerge from the interplays of both social and ludic characteristics. The comprehensive social/ludic measure of this player-avatar interaction (PAX), however, features some dimensions with theoretical/operational gaps and limited reliability, and is available only in English (despite evidence of potential cultural variations in player-avatar relations). The present study aimed to a) enhance and refine the PAX metric, and b) translate and validate a common metric that bridges English, German, and traditional Chinese languages to facilitate future comparative research. Through exploratory factor analysis of data from MMO players in each of these language-based populations, an improved 15-item common Player Avatar Interaction (cPAX) scale is presented, with four dimensions: relational closeness, anthropomorphic autonomy, critical concern, and sense of control. The metric is shown to be reliable within and across populations, and construct validity tests show expected associations between scale dimensions and both player-avatar relationship types and senses of human-like relatedness.

While perspectives on open scholarship practices (OSPs) in Communication are noted in editorials and position papers, as a discipline we lack data-driven insights into how the larger community understands, feels about, engages in, and supports OSPs–insights that could inform current conversations about OSPs in Communication and document how the field shifts in response to ongoing discourses around OS in the current moment. A mixed-methodological survey of International Communication Association members (N = 330) suggested widespread familiarity with and support for some OSPs, but less engagement with them. In open-ended responses, respondents expressed several concerns, including reservations about unclear standards, presumed incompatibility with scholarly approaches, fears of a misuse of shared materials, and perceptions of a toxic culture surrounding open scholarship.

The connection between player and avatar is central to digital gaming, with identification assumed to be core to this connection. Often, scholarship engages single dimensions of identification, yet emerging perspectives reveal that identification is polythetic (PID) ‐ comprising at least six sufficient (but not necessary) mechanisms. The current study investigates the intersections of polythetic identification mechanisms and two different approaches to player‐avatar sociality (as a marker of differentiation): general types of player‐avatar relationships (PARs) and discrete dimensions of player‐avatar interaction (PAX). Secondary analysis of an existing dataset of gamers revealed two main findings: (1) players reported overall diminished identification when they engaged in non-social relations with their avatar, and (2) increased liking and perspective-taking were most likely with human-like social relations, which require differentiation from rather than identification as the avatar. These findings are interpreted to suggest that player‐avatar identification and differentiation are conceptually independent relational phenomena that are experientially convergent ‐ some relational orientations and dynamics are associated with distinct combinations of identification mechanisms.

Affective disposition theory explains that the perceived morality of characters plays a critical role in the experience of enjoyment, but is challenged by the apparent appeal of morally ambiguous c...

Abstract. The Video Game Demand Scale (VGDS) is a 26-item, five-factor scale designed to assess the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demands experienced by video game players. Given the international relevance of video games, cross-cultural research focusing on gamers beyond the US community holds promise to substantiate and refine extant approaches. The current study introduces a German-language VGDS, which was tested for measurement invariance with respect to the original US scale as well as predictive, convergent, and concurrent validity (replicating the original VGDS validity tests). Results revealed configural and partial metric measurement invariance when compared with data from the original scale. Validity tests between the German-language VGDS and common measures of task load, entertainment, need satisfaction, and game ratings largely replicated original results. Overall, we conclude that the VGDS is a reliable, valid, and useful contribution to media psychological game research and suggest areas of future work for which an interactivity-as-demand focus might benefit.

For social sciences such as communication studies, in which key variables are often indirectly measured using myriad operationalizations, issues of construct validity are critical to the veracity o...

Organic compounds in drinking water can be potentially hazardous. In this study, we demonstrate for the first time that combining in-bottle thin-film microextraction (TFME), comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography, and time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC-TOFMS) can produce a powerful, green tool for determining multiple organic pollutants in drinking water and monitoring changes in water samples after treatment with a water purification system. In the developed approach, water is added to an amber sampling bottle containing TFME membranes and left to sit until equilibration is achieved. Once equilibration has been achieved, the membranes are withdrawn, and the extracted compounds are quantified via thermal desorption in the GC × GC-TOFMS system. This approach enabled a large number of organic compounds with a wide range of physicochemical properties to be identified based on their mass spectra. A series of drinking water samples (raw water, water after softener filter, and drinking water) were collected from a standard house faucet in order to analyze changes following treatment with a water purification system. The developed strategy was also applied to identify the concentrations of the 9 selected organic compounds in the water samples. Ultimately, the in-bottle TFME-GC × GC-TOFMS method is straightforward and provides comparable performance to other methods for low-level analyses of organic pollutants in drinking water samples.