Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

A general physiologically driven representation of leaf turnover in grasslands in the QUINCY land surface model (revision: 974a6b7f)

Abstract. Terrestrial vegetation plays an important role in shaping the Earth's climate due to its control on the global carbon cycle. Understanding and predicting vegetation phenology and biomass turnover into soil organic matter is therefore of great importance for our understa...

Resolving closely spaced corners using second order Gaussian directional derivatives

Corner detection is a fundamental step in many computer vision tasks, including image matching and 3D reconstruction. However, closely spaced corners are difficult to distinguish because inappropriate smoothing scales may cause the filtered responses of neighboring structures to...

Adoption pathways for sustainable intensification technologies in the Indian Sundarbans: Combining web-based prediction and natural language processing

Enhancing resilience of resource-constrained smallholder farms in the climate-stressed Sundarbans necessitates evidence-based upscaling of sustainable intensification (SI) technologies. This study aims to enhance the resilience of resource-constrained smallholder farms in the cli...

The Balbi operational model, a simplified physical model for surface fires spread. Part II – model parameterisation and evaluation

Background The ‘Balbi model’ is a simplified physical model for surface fires which provides the main physical characteristics of a fire front and its rate of spread (ROS) as a function of general environmental conditions. In the first part of this work, we describe a simplificat...

The effect of dispersion on the “age” of groundwater calculated from environmental tracers allows a novel way to derive Peclet numbers for large-scale groundwater transport

Abstract New tracer methodologies using stable and radioactive noble gases allow robustly quantifying the velocity of groundwater movement on time scales from years up to 1 million years and more. However, there is a misunderstanding about what the meaning of such a “Tracer Age”...

The Balbi operational model, a simplified physical model for surface fires. Part I – modelling

Background Previously published versions of the ‘Balbi model’ describing surface fire propagation consist of a set of equations based on simplified conservation laws. Their main equation calculating the fire rate of spread (ROS) relied on an iterative process to account for the e...

Current and Future Directions for Responsible Quantum Technologies: A ResQT Community Perspective

Abstract Quantum technologies (QT) are advancing rapidly, promising advancements across a wide spectrum of applications but also raising significant ethical, societal, and geopolitical impacts, including dual-use capabilities, varying levels of access, and impending quantum divid...

Enhancing the Australian coastal wave buoy network: development, implementation, national coordination and future directions

Context Although long-running, regional wave buoy networks exist within Australia, there remain critical spatial gaps in observations and limited coordination of data standards. These limitations result in challenges for using existing observations for national-scale applications...

How energy efficient is it? Making energy efficiency visible in property advertising: a content analysis of one million Australian residential listings

Residential energy efficiency plays a critical role in supporting the energy transition towards net zero. Policies aimed at the disclosure of residential energy efficiency information at the time of sale and/or lease often focus on the disclosure of home energy ratings and/or ene...

Efficient distinctiveness maximization in datasets assemblage: from homogeneous to heterogeneous datasets

Abstract We study the distinctiveness maximization problem for datasets assemblage: assembling a set of datasets from a repository that satisfies a user-specified target schema and query set under a budget constraint, while maximizing the number of distinct tuples. This problem i...

Haplotype-phased assemblies of the two poplar rust fungi species: Melampsora larici-populina and Melampsora allii-populina

Dikaryotic rust fungi maintain two distinct haploid nuclei for most of their life cycle, making their large, repeat-rich genomes difficult to assemble and phase. Here we present haplotype-phased, near chromosome-scale genome assemblies for the poplar rust pathogens Melampsora lar...

Fast and noise-aware machine learning variational quantum eigensolver optimiser

Abstract The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for preparing ground states in the current era of noisy devices. The classical component of the algorithm requires a large number of measurements on intermediate parameter values that are t...

Do weather-related extreme events influence climate-related opinions? The case of the 2019–2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires

Abstract We report three studies examining the impact of the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires, known as the Black Summer, on Australians’ climate-related opinions. Study 1 was conducted before the peak of the bushfires, whereas studies 2 and 3 were conducted afterwards. In all stud...

Soil disturbance in wetlands by feral pigs increases greenhouse gas emissions

Abstract. Multiple approaches are needed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the pace of climate change. Wetlands are among the most carbon-rich ecosystems on the planet, and when disturbed, they can generate disproportionately high emissions. Invasive hoofed mammals,...

A generalized algorithm for inferring wildfire evacuation decisions and departure times using large-scale mobile device location data

Understanding wildfire evacuation behavior is essential for effective disaster planning, yet current approaches often rely on event-specific methods that limit broader applicability. This paper proposes a generalized algorithm for inferring wildfire evacuation decisions and depar...

Identification of living (Rose Bengal)-stained benthic foraminifera using automated image recognition

Abstract. Living and fossil benthic foraminifera are widely used as bioindicators of ecosystem quality, but their analysis is time-consuming. With the help of artificial intelligence, models for the automatic identification of fossil planktonic foraminifera and, more recently, be...

Effects of pre-spawning heat stress on the fecundity of Acropora aspera

<title>Abstract</title> Repeated bleaching events driven by heat stress have caused extensive coral mortality and long-term impairment in survivors. Following bleaching, larval production and recruitment decline, undermining reef recovery. On the Great Barrier Reef, such heat-str...

MSSFFE-Net: a fine-grained object recognition network based on multi-scale spatial-frequency domain feature enhancement

The challenge of few-shot fine-grained image classification lies in the scarcity of labeled training samples, which hinders models from learning subtle discriminative patterns. Moreover, most existing methods rely heavily on spatial-domain convolutional operations while overlooki...

Knowledge is power: the importance of subjective knowledgeability for supporting technology adoption in the Australian grain industry

Agriculture 4.0 technologies such as automated machinery, precision farming, and data-driven decision-making can today help farmers manage the challenges of economic instability and climate adaptation. Yet uptake of on-farm technology is often variable, with reported barriers rel...

Initial growth of fires in eucalypt litter, from ignition to quasi-steady-state rate of spread: A.G. McArthur’s field experiments

Background There are currently no operational fire spread models intended for predicting nascent fire spread such as of point ignitions or spotfires in Australia. Aims To determine if previous findings from point ignition experiments in dry eucalypt litter in a combustion wind tu...