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Certification is highlighted as a key sustainable tourism management tool. Yet, very little is known about visitors' perceptions of such schemes. This is an important gap: the success of certification schemes depends on consumers' confidence in the quality of products and services that the schemes endorse. This paper surveyed 610 visitors to the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and surrounds in Queensland, Australia about (1) the perceived importance of various attributes of the ECO certification scheme; and (2) the perceived performance of operators based on those attributes. Data analysis identified aspects of ECO certification and of operator performance that may need improvement. It found that importance of attributes varied across products and visitor groups; at accommodations, most attributes were perceived to be important, Nature (as an aesthetic experience) and Marketing being more important than others, while at attractions and on tours, visitors were indifferent. Younger visitors rated Environment and Conservation more highly than their older counterparts and females rated Conservation more highly than males. Visitors -notably at accommodations -considered that ECO certified operators were performing "better" than non-ECO certified operators on many attributes. How these visitor perceptions translate into reality remains an important topic for future research.

This study investigated the diet of dugongs (Dugong dugon, Dugongidae) and green turtles (Chelonia mydas, Cheloniidae) on the Orman Reefs in Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, where large numbers of these animals live sympatrically. The stomach contents of dugongs and green turtles caught in an indigenous fishery were examined. Dugongs fed exclusively on seagrasses (mainly Thalassia hemprichii, Cymodocea spp. and Syringodium isoetifolium) whereas turtles consumed both seagrasses (especially T. hemprichii and Enhalus acoroides) and algae (mainly Hypnea spp., Laurencia spp. and Caulerpa spp.). The two herbivores showed no overlap in resource use except for the seagrass T. hemprichii, which was abundant in the feeding area.Both species appeared to feed selectively and did not just consume the most available food items. These results are suggestive of partitioning of food resources between dugongs and green turtles but a full explanation requires more detailed, and concurrent, study of the food resources and the animals' movements.

Identification of threats is a standard component of conservation planning and the ability to rank threats may improve the allocation of scarce resources in threat-mitigation programs. For vulnerable and endangered sea turtles in Australia, vessel strike is recognised as an important threat but its severity relative to other threats remains speculative. Documented evidence for this problem is available only in stranding records collected by the Queensland Environment Protection Authority. With the authority's support we assessed the scope and quality of the data and analysed vessel-related records. We found adequate evidence that during the period 1999-2002 at least 65 turtles were killed annually as a result of collisions with vessels on the Queensland east coast. This level of mortality appears broadly comparable to that recorded in the Queensland East Coast Trawl Fishery before the introduction of mandatory turtle-exclusion devices in that fishery. Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) comprised the majority of vessel-related records, followed by loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta), and 72% of cases concerned adult or subadult turtles. The majority of vessel-related records came from the greater Moreton Bay area, followed by Hervey Bay and Cleveland Bay. The waters of all three areas are subject to variable levels of commercial and recreational vessel traffic, and their shores are both populated and unpopulated.

Contemporary science educators must equip their students with the knowledge and practical know-how to connect multiple disciplines like mathematics, computing and the natural sciences to gain a richer and deeper understanding of a scientific problem. However, many biology and earth science students are prejudiced against mathematics due to negative emotions like high mathematical anxiety and low mathematical confidence. Here, we present a theoretical framework that investigates linkages between student engagement, mathematical anxiety, mathematical confidence, student achievement and subject mastery. We implement this framework in a large, first-year interdisciplinary science subject and monitor its impact over several years from 2010 to 2015. The implementation of the framework coincided with an easing of anxiety and enhanced confidence, as well as higher student satisfaction, retention and achievement. The framework offers interdisciplinary science educators greater flexibility and confidence in their approach to designing and delivering subjects that rely on mathematical concepts and practices.