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Water managing systems are becoming more complex as new institutional arrangements are created in response to a changing climate. Our inquiry centred on the 'water managing system' within a nested set of Australian water governance regimes, including relevant local, regional, state and national governance regimes. New institutions in national and state systems, seemingly intended to reduce complexity through centralisation or integration, only increase complexity by adding to the existing mix of institutional arrangements. This complexity can reduce the effectiveness of water managing organisations by increasing administrative burden, creating high costs of entry for new staff and leading to confusion in communications with external stakeholders. Regional water managers deal with this complexity by drawing on relational capital built from long-term engagement in the water managing system. However, relational capital is difficult to build and easy to destroy, thus this 'soft' capacity is under threat from shifts in decision making power and of resources out of regional water governance systems. Institutional innovation is therefore required to create opportunities to build relational capital in order to effectively manage natural resources at the regional level as coupled socio-ecological systems.

K-10 montmorillonite, commonly used as a heterogeneous acid catalyst, was found to vary in the extent of acid-treatment, with some batches exhibiting significantly reduced catalytic activity in Brønsted acid-catalysed reactions. K-10 was thus further treated with HCl of varying concentrations to increase its activity in acid-catalysed reactions. Acid-treated clays exhibited significant enhancements in catalytic activity in three test reactions; tetrahydropyranylation of ethanol, diacetylation of benzaldehyde and esterification of succinic anhydride. Acid-treatment of K-10 was shown to result in protonation, and loss of layer stacking of the clay structure, as determined by powder X-ray diffraction, inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform (DRIFT) spectroscopy and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) specific surface area measurements. Quantifiable physical changes to the K-10 correlated with measurable increases in catalytic activity. Standard procedures for assessing acid-treated montmorillonite clay catalysts, such as K-10, and procedures for obtaining the most effective catalyst for acid-catalysed reactions, involving analytical and synthetic techniques, were devised.

. 2018. Learning from collaborative research on sustainably managing fresh water: implications for ethical research-practice engagement. Ecology and Society 23 (1) ABSTRACT. Since the mid-2000s, there has been increasing recognition of the promise of collaborative research and management for addressing complex issues in sustainably managing fresh water. A large variety of collaborative freshwater research and management processes is now evident around the world. However, how collective knowledge development, coproduction, or cocreation is carried out in an ethical manner is less well known. From the literature and our experiences as applied, transdisciplinary researchers and natural resource management practitioners, we seek to describe and explore these aspects of empirical cases of collaborative freshwater research and management. Drawing on cases from Indigenous community-based natural resource management in northern Australia, flood and drought risk management in Bulgaria, water management and climate change adaptation in the Pacific, and regional catchment and estuary management in Victoria and New South Wales in Australia, we identify lessons to support improved collaborative sustainable freshwater management research and practice. Cocreation represents an emerging approach to participation and collaboration in freshwater management research-practice and can be seen to constitute four interlinked and iterative phases: coinitiation, codesign, coimplementation, and coevaluation. For freshwater researchers and managers and their collaborators, paying attention to these phases and the ethical dilemmas that arise within each phase will support the cocreation of more effective and ethical research-practice through: sensitizing collaborators to the need for reflexivity in research-practice, proposing action research codesign as a method for managing emergent questions and outcomes, and supporting more equitable outcomes for collaborators through an emphasis on coevaluation and collaborative articulation of the links between research outputs and practice outcomes.

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The past decade the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) have been actively pursuing the use of the Belief, Desires, and Intention (BDI) agent model in operations analysis and computer generated forces. It has been shown that the BDI approach to agent programming brings the particular advantage of using terms and concepts that are familiar to all. For instance, in Air Operations studies, the tactical behaviour of a simulated pilot can he reviewed and verified directly by a real pilot, through inspection of the simulated tactical reasoning processes. At present the challenge is to bring this a step forward with appropriate tools and a control environment that enable pilots to operate an uninhabited airbome vehicle (UAV) during mission by means of tactical directives. Our experience has demonstrated that the BDI model provides a suitable framework for capturing tactical behaviours in the air operation domain. We have also demonstrated that the representation of these behaviours in terms of BDI plans is6 readily understandable by domain experts. However the current development process requires an experienced BDI developer to work with a domain expert in order to develop an appropriate set of agent behaviours. We would like to remove the BDI developer fiom the loop ~ this paper represents a first step in the achievement of that objective. In order to remove the BDI developer, we need to answer the following questions: 1. Can we provide the domain expert with a suitable (nonprogramming) environment for specification of agent behaviours? Can agent behaviour in this domain he partitioned into a declarative component (involving goals and plans) and a domain specific kemel? The focus of this paper is the fKst question, and we describe recent work on such a specification environment. The idea is that for controlling a UAV as an 'autonomous wingman', the pilot instructs the UAV by forming and commanding tactical plans at a suitable level of abstraction. The autonomous wingman would process these plans in the 2.context of common-sense background behaviour. Technically , this control environment is a simplified programming environment, where the pilot is presented with a collection of programming 'primitives' of high-level tactical behaviours and world-events based on the platform's sensor system. By combining primitives into plans. the pilot can build up a sensible instruction sequence for the UAV to accomplish particular tasks in ways appropriate for the situation at hand during mission.

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