Institute of Australian Geographers

The IAG Conference Final Program for the Cairns IAG 2009 Conference “Balancing Choices and Effects in a Dynamic World’, James Cook University, Cairns, 28 September - 1 October has been added to the conference website:
http://www.iag.org.au/conferences-events/iag-conference-cairns-2009/
Final Conference Program for IAG 2009 Conference has been posted to conference website..
Note the new URL for the Sunbus company http://www.sunbus.com.au/sit_timetables/cairns/Northern_Suburbs.pdf.

Lesley Head awarded a Laureate Fellowship

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, announced on 22 June 2009, in a ceremony at Parliament House, that 15 world-leading scholars will be awarded Australian Laureate Fellowships worth around $2.7 million each.

One of the scholars awarded a Fellowship is the President of the Institute of Australian Geographers, Professor Lesley Head.

In announcing the awards Senator Carr said that the Australian Laureate Fellowship scheme takes the best elements of the previous Federation Fellowships scheme and adds a focus on team work, career paths and leadership. ‘As part of the Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme, successful fellows will lead and mentor the next generation of research leaders, helping to build Australia’s international competitive research capacity. The work will focus on areas of national economic, environmental, cultural and social benefit …’

The 15 successful Australian Laureate Fellows were selected from a highly competitive field of 148 researchers, and the Fellowships are worth around $2.7 million each.

Professor Head was awarded her Fellowship for work in the area of cultural environmental research: the missing link in multidisciplinary approaches to sustainability. The announcement of her award provided the following biographical information.

Professor Head is Professor and Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong. Her research has focused on long-term changes in the Australian landscape and the material and conceptual interactions that both prehistoric and contemporary peoples have had with these environments.

Professor Head’s project will bring together two main intellectual currents; geographical and archaeological understandings of long term environmental change, including anthropogenic contributions, combined with a critical social sciences perspective on relations between human and non-human worlds. This research will contribute to building Australia’s international research presence in the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, with particular strengths in ethnographic and related social science methods.

Professor Head was awarded her PhD in Geography from Monash University. She was appointed the King Carl XVI Gustaf Visiting Professor of Environmental Science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. She is the only Australian to have received this award. Professor Head was Director of the GeoQuEST Research Centre and has been elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and is currently the President of the Institute Australian Geographers.

Professor Head has been involved in a number of committees, and has been the Chair (2006-08) of the Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Geography.

Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2009 in Cairns

‘Balancing Choices and Effects in a Dynamic World’
Cairns IAG 2009 Conference
James Cook University
Cairns
28 September - 1 October, 2009

The official conference website, with details of the programme and registration, can be found at: http://www.iag.org.au/conferences-events/iag-conference-cairns-2009/

Geographical Research goes to ‘Early View’

We are very pleased to announce that, in cooperation with our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, Geographical Research will now be available electronically, online, in ‘Early View’ (previously termed ‘Online Early’ but changed following the merger of Blackwell Synergy into Wiley InterScience).

Early View papers are produced individually or in small batches. Papers are dealt with in the usual way: submitted to editors, refereed, returned to authors for revision, revised papers are copy-edited by the editors and returned to authors for approval, often with further queries, and then forwarded to the publisher once authors and editors are satisfied. Proofs will be sent from the publisher to authors and the relevant editor as they are prepared individually or in small batches, and the editor will incorporate all the changes into the proof and send the corrections back to the publisher. Authors are asked to note that only errors may be corrected at the proof stage: this is not the time to rewrite the paper. Once the paper is finalised it is published online, and at that point the article is considered fully published and no further changes can be made. When it is time to collate the issue, papers will be paginated and published in print and in the issue table of contents online. If there is an error in a paper published in Early View it would need to be corrected with an erratum, just as if it had been published in a hard copy issue.

There are two main benefits for authors, as we see it. First, most papers will be published more quickly than at present. There will no longer be a lag between final acceptance and copy-editing, and publication; whereas at present this lag may extend over several months.

Second, authors’ papers receive two exposures: once when the article is placed in Early View, and second when it appears in the printed version. Early View papers are cited by their digital object identifier (doi) number: at that stage they will not have volume, issue or page numbers. In all other respects they are full publications.

Geographical Research Articles on Early View:

Commentary
 An Inconvenient Truth (2006) (Directed by Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore, Paramount Pictures, USA): Review Symposium (p)
JON BARNETT, PETER CHRISTOFF, HARIPRIYA RANGAN, ELISSA SUTHERLAND
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:54AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00560.x

Papers
 Imizamo Yethu: a Case Study of Community Resilience to Fire Hazard in an Informal Settlement Cape Town, South Africa (p))
E. WENDY HARTE, IRAPHNE R.W. CHILDS, PETER A. HASTINGS
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:53AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00561.x

 Factors Affecting Late Twentieth Century Land Use Patterns in Kamakura City, Japan (p)
OH IWATA, TAKASHI OGUCHI
Published Online: Jan 6 2009 5:52AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00559.x

 The Role of Fire Disturbance on Runoff and Erosion Processes – a Long-Term Approach, Mt. Carmel Case Study, Israel (p)
LEA WITTENBERG, MOSHE INBAR
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:18AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00554.x

 The Role of Land Management in Shaping Arid/Semi-arid Landscapes: the Case of the Catholic Church (CICM) in Western Inner Mongolia from the 1870s (Late Qing Dynasty) to the 1940s (Republic of China) (p)
XIAOHONG ZHANG, TAO SUN, JINGSHU ZHANG
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:17AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00558.x

 Planning to Reduce Risk: The Wildfire Management Overlay in Victoria, Australia (p)
RACHEL HUGHES, DAVID MERCER
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:15AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00556.x

 Human Adaptive Responses to Catastrophic Landscape Disruptions During the Holocene at Numundo, PNG (p)
J.F. PARR, W.E. BOYD, V. HARRIOTT, R. TORRENCE
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:14AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00553.x

 MODIS-derived NDVI Characterisation of Drought-Induced Evergreen Dieoff in Western North America (p )
ANDREW N. YUHAS, LOUIS A. SCUDERI
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:14AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00557.x

 The Design and Development of a Closed Chamber for the in-situ Quantification of Dryland Soil Carbon Dioxide Fluxes (p)
STEPHEN R. HOON, ANDREW D. THOMAS, PATRICIA E LINTON
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:13AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00551.x

 A Strategic Framework for Monitoring Coastal Change in Australia’s Wet-dry Tropics – Concepts and Progress (p )
C. MAX FINLAYSON, IAN ELIOT, MATTHEW ELIOT
Published Online: Nov 28 2008 1:13AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00549.x

 Chemical Weathering of Detrital Sediments in the Taklamakan Desert, Northwestern China (p)
BINGQI ZHU, XIAOPING YANG
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:29PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00555.x

 History of Deforestation and Reforestation in the Dinaric Karst (p)
ANDREJ KRANJC
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:28PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00552.x

 Drivers of Unsustainable Land Use in the Semi-Arid Khabur River Basin, Syria (p)
FRANK HOLE
Published Online: Oct 23 2008 8:28PM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00550.x

Arthur Conacher, George Curry and Roy Jones (editors)

The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) 2009 conference is being jointly hosted by the University of Western Australia, Curtin University of Technology, Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University and will be held at the University of Western Australia.
The Conference will focus on the contemporary and future form and structure of Australian/New Zealand cities in light of the recent global economic downturn and recent political changes at the national level in both countries. The over-arching theme of the
2009 Conference is: CITY GROWTH, SUSTAINABILITY, VITALITY AND VULNERABILITY

Call for Abstracts closes Friday 6 March 2009
Conference Website: http://www.promaco.com.au/2009/soac

Council has made a response to the questions asked by the Towards a National Geography Curriculum Project.  The response can be found under About IAG, Submissions of the IAG.  For more information on the Project, see their website at http://www.ngc.org.au.

The Tenth Asian Urbanization Conference 16-19 August 2009
First call for papers - See conference website for more details http://www.hku.hk/asia2009

The Association of American Geographers invites you to join 8,000 geographers, GIS specialists, and environmental scientists from around the world in Las Vegas for the very latest in research, policy, and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience, during our annual conference, to be held March 22-27, 2009.
The program will feature 4,000 presentations by leading scholars and researchers from more than 60 countries, an international networking reception, and exhibitions showcasing recent scholarly publications, advanced geographic technologies, and expanding employment opportunities. Numerous field trips will also explore the rich cultural and physical geography of Las Vegas and the surrounding region.
To register for the meeting or submit a paper, visit www.aag.org/annualmeeting.

The new website of the IAG was launched today. It has been completely redesigned by Electronic Productivity Solutions (www.eps.com.au), a Melbourne web development and design company. Much of the content will be familiar to members as it has been imported from the old site, but we have taken the opportunity of a redesign to add new material. There is much more information on the Institute itself, including items on the establishment of the IAG (appropriate in our 50th year), a page on the awards conferred by the Institute, and a list of all recipients of an award. The section headed About Geography is intended to provide information for non-members on Geography as a field of study, and may eventually contain material for school and university students. The role played by postgraduate students in the activities of the Institute has been recognised by giving them a separate heading on the Home Page. The site is fully searchable.A members-only section is still being developed. This will contain minutes of General Meetings, reports from Council, submissions by the IAG, news on research projects, and a searchable membership directory. The directory will be part of a new membership database with the following features:

• online membership application and renewal
• automatic generation of receipts
• automatic notification of study group interests to convenors
• the facility for members to update the information in their entry
• the facility to send emails to all members

This will make it much easier to communicate with members. In the past we have used the IAG-List as a medium of electronic communication, but only one-third of members subscribe to the List, while two-thirds of the people on the List are not members. We now hope to be able to send members items of news and information each month.

Membership renewal for 2009 will be done online, with members filling in their personal details and areas of interest to add to the database. You will be sent an email late this year explaining how to register to login to the membership system and enter your details.

The photos on the main pages of the new site were taken by the following members of the IAG: Clive Forster, Arthur Conacher, Richard Baker, Jim Walmsley, Amity James, George Curry, Iain Hay and Alaric Maude.

Some areas of the new site are still under development, and more material will be added over the next few months. If you have suggestions for additions or corrections to the content please contact either the Secretary, Alaric Maude, or the Web Secretary, Julie Kesby, whose contact details are on the Contact Us page.

The URL remains the same: http://www.iag.org.au

If you have a research project that you would like to publicise, please send the information to the Secretary (Web), Julie Kesby, email: j.kesby@adfa.edu.au.