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Robotic weed control has seen increased research of late with its potential for boosting productivity in agriculture. Majority of works focus on developing robotics for croplands, ignoring the weed management problems facing rangeland stock farmers. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to widespread uptake of robotic weed control is the robust classification of weed species in their natural environment. The unparalleled successes of deep learning make it an ideal candidate for recognising various weed species in the complex rangeland environment. This work contributes the first large, public, multiclass image dataset of weed species from the Australian rangelands; allowing for the development of robust classification methods to make robotic weed control viable. The DeepWeeds dataset consists of 17,509 labelled images of eight nationally significant weed species native to eight locations across northern Australia. This paper presents a baseline for classification performance on the dataset using the benchmark deep learning models, Inception-v3 and ResNet-50. These models achieved an average classification accuracy of 95.1% and 95.7%, respectively. We also demonstrate real time performance of the ResNet-50 architecture, with an average inference time of 53.4 ms per image. These strong results bode well for future field implementation of robotic weed control methods in the Australian rangelands., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables

This study reports palynological and geochemical results for modern and ancient sediments from 19 lakes on a rainfall gradient (784-1880 mm), across a range of savannas in Northern Australia. All proxies varied significantly across the range of sites examined, providing a robust envelope of values that can reliably be employed to identify a savanna signature in the sedimentary record. While the results indicate it is possible to identify a savanna, we found only three statistically significant relationships between any proxy measured in surface sediments and the major climate driver of savanna vegetation composition (rainfall amount). This is because edaphic factors play a dominant role in determining vegetation composition and also potentially because of the impact of land use change. Measures of fire determined by charcoal counting were positively correlated with geochemical measures of pyrogenic carbon abundance, suggesting both record a similar signal. While measures of fire incidence were not correlated with rainfall, there was a significant positive correlation between charcoal abundance and number of fires early in the dry season, suggesting that charcoal abundance is controlled more by the number/timing of fires than climate. There was also a significant correlation between the delta C-13-value of pyrogenic carbon and tree:grass ratio derived from palynological indicators, indicating that the delta C-13-value of PyC is a reliable indicator of savanna 'woodiness'. Comparison of the carbon isotope composition of total organic carbon, PyC and n-alkanes between modern and Holocene sediments suggest that the savannas of the region have remained either similar in 'woodiness' or have thickened over the last millennia.

Laminated sediments in Lake Ohau, Mackenzie Basin, New Zealand, offer a potential high-resolution climate record for the past 17 kyr. Such records are particularly important due to the relative paucity of detailed palaeoclimate data from the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. This paper presents outcomes of a study of the sedimentation processes of this temperate lake setting. Hydrometeorological, limnological and sedimentological data were collected over a 14 month period between 2011 and 2013. These data indicate that seasonality in the hydrometeorological system in combination with internal lake dynamics drives a distinct seasonal pattern of sediment dispersal and deposition on a basin-wide scale. Sedimentary layers that accumulate proximal to the lake inflow at the northern end of the lake form in response to discrete inflow events throughout the year and display an event stratigraphy. In contrast, seasonal change in the lake system controls accumulation of light (winter) and dark (summer) laminations at the distal end of the lake, resulting in the preservation of varves. This study documents the key processes influencing sediment deposition throughout Lake Ohau and provides fundamental data for generating a high-resolution palaeoclimate record from this temperate lake.

The high cost of acoustic Doppler ocean current meters means few are deployed in marine research studies. To address this problem, we have developed a low-cost robust current velocimeter based on the drag-tilt principle. The instrument tilts in response to current flow, for which the angle and direction of tilt are related to the water velocity. Static analytic approximation shows a sigmoid-type tilt response to increasing current speed. We detail a calibration method that models the relationship using a Gompertz curve. Calibration and field tests conducted near Magnetic Island, Australia, show a speed accuracy of 0.05 m/s for current speeds less than 0.6 m/s, and direction accuracy better than 15 ° for current speeds greater than 0.15 m/s. This instrument should be especially useful for research projects where numerous or spatially dense measurements of ocean currents are required.

Coral reefs are increasingly subjected to both local and global stressors, however, there is limited information on how reef organisms respond to their combined effects under natural conditions. This field study examined the growth response of the damselfish Neopomacentrus bankieri to the individual and combined effects of multiple abiotic factors. Turbidity, temperature, tidal movement, and wave action were recorded every 10 minutes for four months, after which the daily otolith growth of N. bankieri was aligned with corresponding abiotic conditions. Temperature was the only significant driver of daily otolith increment width, with increasing temperatures resulting in decreasing width. Although tidal movement was not a significant driver of increment width by itself, the combined effect of tidal movement and temperature had a greater negative effect on growth than temperature alone. Our results indicate that temperature can drive changes in growth even at very fine scales, and demonstrate that the cumulative impact of abiotic factors can be substantially greater than individual effects. As abiotic factors continue to change in intensity and duration, the combined impacts of them will become increasingly important drivers of physiological and ecological change.

Water turbidity and suspended sediment concentration (SSC) are commonly used as part of marine monitoring and water quality plans. Current management plans utilise threshold SSC values derived from mean-annual turbidity concentrations. Little published work documents typical ranges of turbidity for reefs within open coastal waters. Here, time-series turbidity measurements from 61 sites in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and Moreton Bay, Australia, are presented as turbidity exceedance curves and derivatives. This contributes to the understanding of turbidity and SSC in the context of environmental management in open-coastal reef environments. Exceedance results indicate strong spatial and temporal variability in water turbidity across inter/intraregional scales. The highest turbidity across 61 sites, at 50% exceedance (T50) is 15.3 NTU and at 90% exceedance (T90) 4.1 NTU. Mean/median turbidity comparisons show strong differences between the two, consistent with a strongly skewed turbidity regime. Results may contribute towards promoting refinement of water quality management protocols.

Sedimentation is considered the most widespread contemporary, human-induced perturbation on reefs, and yet if the problems associated with its estimation using sediment traps are recognized, there have been few reliable measurements made over time frames relevant to the local organisms. This study describes the design, calibration and testing of an in situ optical backscatter sediment deposition sensor capable of measuring sedimentation over intervals of a few hours. The instrument has been reconfigured from an earlier version to include 15 measurement points instead of one, and to have a more rugose measuring surface with a microtopography similar to a coral. Laboratory tests of the instrument with different sediment types, colours, particle sizes and under different flow regimes gave similar accumulation estimates to SedPods, but lower estimates than sediment traps. At higher flow rates (9–17 cm s−1), the deposition sensor and SedPods gave estimates >10× lower than trap accumulation rates. The instrument was deployed for 39 d in a highly turbid inshore area in the Great Barrier Reef. Sediment deposition varied by several orders of magnitude, occurring in either a relatively uniform (constant) pattern or a pulsed pattern characterized by short-term (4–6 h) periods of ‘enhanced’ deposition, occurring daily or twice daily and modulated by the tidal phase. For the whole deployment, which included several very high wind events and suspended sediment concentrations (SSCs) >100 mg L−1, deposition rates averaged 19 ± 16 mg cm−2 d−1. For the first half of the deployment, where SSCs varied from