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Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Griffith School of Environment, Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology, Globally, nature-based tourism and recreation is increasing. As a result there is more and more infrastructure provided to allow access to natural areas, including recreational trails used for popular activities such as mountain-biking and hiking. There are many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trails in natural areas worldwide, but what impacts do they have on native plant communities, especially those already threatened with extinction? The first step in addressing this question involved undertaking a global systematic quantitative literature review to assess what is known and unknown about the impacts of recreational trails on vegetation and soils. The review found that of the 59 original research papers, most assessed formal trails in well-funded protected areas often looking at local-scale compositional impacts and/or trail degradation using rather location-specific, crisis-driven approaches. There were major gaps in the literature including research: (1) on threatened plant communities, (2) on temporal effects, (3) on structural and functional impacts, (4) comparing different types of trails and (5) assessing landscape-scale impacts such as fragmentation. To start to address some of these gaps, the field work component of the thesis assessed trail impacts in three contrasting threatened plant communities in Australia where trail-based recreation is popular. The aims were to determine: (1) if recreational trails damage threatened plant communities, (2) if impacts occur at direct local, indirect local and cumulative landscape scales, (3) if trails affect compositional, structural and/or functional facets of the communities and (4) if impacts vary among different types of trails.

This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities associated with planning for competitive, smart and healthy cities. The chapter is based on the assumptions that a healthy city is an important prerequisite for a competitive city and a fundamental outcome of smart cities. Thus, it is preeminent to understand the planning decision support system based on local determinants of health, economic and social factors. One of the major decision support systems is e-health and this chapter will focus on the role of e-health planning, by utilising web-based geographic decision support systems. The proposed novel decision support system would provide a powerful and effective platform for stakeholders to access online information for a better decision-making while empowering community participation. The chapter also highlights the need for a comprehensive conceptual framework to guide the decision process of planning for healthy cities in association with opportunities and limitations. In summary, this chapter provides the critical insights of using information science-based framework and suggest online decision support methods, as part of a broader e-health approach for creating a healthy, competitive and smart city.

We measured the association between urban form and hospitalisation rates for Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD), stratified by age and sex, and controlling for ethnicity, socio economic status, proximity to hospital and neighbourhood walk ability. This was a retrospective cohort study of the proportion of people within the Brisbane area of Australia who were hospitalised between 2006 to 2011 with a primary diagnosis of IHD. There were strong spatial patterns in the incidence of IHD. The importance of predictor variables differed by sex and age. Urban form was generally not a strong predictor. This study suggests no strong relationship was identified between urban form factors and ischemic heart disease using this research approach.

Objective: To review the clinical data for people with diabetes mellitus with reference to their location and clinical care in a general practice in Australia. Materials and methods: Patient data were extracted from a general practice in Western Australia. Iterative data-cleansing steps were taken. Data were grouped into Statistical Area level 1 (SA1), designated as the smallest geographical area associated with the Census of Population and Housing. The data were analysed to identify if SA1s with people aged 70 years and older, and with relatively high glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) were significantly clustered, and whether this was associated with their medical consultation rate and treatment. The analysis included Cluster and Outlier Analysis using Moran's I test. Results: The overall median age of the population was 70 years with more males than females, 53% and 47%, respectively. Older people (>70 years) with relatively high HbA1c comprised 9.3% of all people with diabetes in the sample, and were clustered around two ‘hotspot’ locations. These 111 patients do not attend the practice more or less often than people with diabetes living elsewhere in the practice (p=0.098). There was some evidence that they were more likely to be recorded as having consulted with regard to other chronic diseases. The average number of prescribed medicines over a 13-month time period, per person in the hotspots, was 4.6 compared with 5.1 in other locations (p=0.26). Their prescribed therapy was deemed to be consistent with the management of people with diabetes in other locations with reference to the relevant diabetes guidelines.Conclusions Older patients with relatively high HbA1c are clustered in two locations within the practice area. Their hyperglycaemia and ongoing cardiovascular risk indicates causes other than therapeutic inertia. The causes may be related to the social determinants of health, which are influenced by geography.

Nature–based tourism and recreation activities have a range of environmental impacts, but most protected area agencies have limited capacity to assess them. To prioritise where and what impacts to monitor and manage, we conducted a desktop assessment using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) by combining recreation ecology research with data on visitor usage and key environmental features for a popular protected area used for mountaineering and trekking, Aconcagua Provincial Park (2400–6962 m a.s.l.) in the Andes of Argentina. First, we integrated visitor data from permits with environmental data using GIS. We then identified key impact indicators for different activities based on the recreation ecology literature. Finally, we integrated this data to identify likely ecological impacts based on the types of activities, amount of use and altitudinal zones. Visitors only used 2% of the Park, but use was concentrated in areas of high conservation value including in alpine meadows and glacier lakes. Impacts on water resources were likely to be concentrated in campsites from the intermediate to the nival/glacial zones of the Park while impacts on terrestrial biodiversity were likely to be more severe in the low and intermediate alpine zones (2400–3800 m a.s.l.). These results highlight how visitor data can be used to identify priority areas for on-ground assessment of impacts in key locations. Improvements to the management of visitors in this Park involves more effective ways of dealing with water extraction and human waste in high altitude campsites and the impacts of hikers and pack animals in the low and intermediate alpine zones.

This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities associated with planning for competitive, smart and healthy cities. The chapter is based on the assumptions that a healthy city is an important prerequisite for a competitive city and a fundamental outcome of smart cities. One of the major decision support systems to support healthy cities is e-health. This chapter focuses on the role of e-health planning, by utilising web-based geographic decision support systems. The chapter proposes the implementation of a novel decision system which would provide a powerful and effective platform for stakeholders to support access online information. This would also provide for better decision-making as well as empower community participation. The chapter highlights the need for a comprehensive conceptual framework to guide the decision process of planning for cities in association with opportunities and limitations. This chapter provides critical insights into using information science-based frameworks.

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Griffith School of Environment, Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology, Protected area managers often face the challenge of conserving biodiversity while at the same time providing tourism and recreational opportunities for visitors. Popular nature based activities in more remote mountain protected areas include sightseeing, hiking and mountaineering. There are often commercial services provided to support these activities including pack animals for transport and campsite services. These, along with general visitor use, can result in a range of ecological impacts on soils, vegetation, wildlife and aquatic systems. In mountain ecosystems, impacts on vegetation are particularly important as alpine plants often have limited capacity to recover from damage due to the short growing season and poor soils. While a range of impacts from visitor use have been documented in alpine ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere, there is limited research in the Southern Hemisphere. This is particularly true for the Andes, even though they account for 13% of the world’s mountains and are increasingly popular destinations for hiking and mountaineering. Prior to this thesis, for example, there was only one Masters thesis that assessed visitor impacts in the highest protected area in the Southern Hemisphere, Aconcagua Provincial Park in the dry Andes of Argentina, despite the Park receiving over 33,000 visitors per year. Impacts of visitor use on vegetation in this Park and other protected areas in the dry Andes is of particular concern as visitor use tends to be concentrated in the few areas where vegetation is found. This includes concentrated visitor use of alpine steppe vegetation (29.5% of the Park) and alpine meadows (0.4%) in Aconcagua Park. This thesis assesses the ecological impacts of increasing visitor use of Aconcagua Provincial Park, including impacts on vegetation.

Remnant urban forests are often popular sites for recreational activities such as hiking, biking and motorised recreation. This can result in the formation of extensive trail networks, fragmenting vegetation into patches separated by modified edge effects and ultimately contributing to the degradation of the ecosystem as a whole. Here we use a GIS approach to assess the extent and diversity of trail-based fragmentation across 17 remnants of endangered urban forest (total area 829 ha, Tall Open Blackbutt Forest) in southeast Queensland, Australia. Fourteen different trail types totalling 46.1 km were mapped with informal biking and hiking trails the most common (57%, 26.5 km). More than 47 ha (5.7%) of forest have been lost to trails and their edge effect, nearly equal to the area recently cleared for urban development. The degree of fragmentation in some remnants was in the same order of magnitude as found for some of the most popular nature-based recreation sites in the world. In localised areas, the fragmentation was particularly severe as a result of wide trails used by motorised recreation, but these trails were generally uncommon across the landscape (5%). Spatial regression revealed that the number of access points per remnant was positively correlated with the degree of fragmentation. We encourage more landscape-scale research into trail-based fragmentation due to its capacity to impact extensive areas of endangered ecosystems. Management should seek to minimise the creation of informal trails by hardening popular routes, instigating stakeholder collaboration and centralising visitor flow.

Objectives: The application of GIS in health science has increased over the last decade and new innovative application areas have emerged. This study reviews the literature and builds a framework to provide a conceptual overview of the domain, and to promote strategic planning for further research of GIS in health. Method: The framework is based on literature from the library databases Scopus and Web of Science. The articles were identified based on keywords and initially selected for further study based on titles and abstracts. A grounded theory-inspired method was applied to categorize the selected articles in main focus areas. Subsequent frequency analysis was performed on the identified articles in areas of infectious and non-infectious diseases and continent of origin. Results: A total of 865 articles were included. Four conceptual domains within GIS in health sciences comprise the framework: spatial analysis of disease, spatial analysis of health service planning, public health, health technologies and tools. Frequency analysis by disease status and location show that malaria and schistosomiasis are the most commonly analyzed infectious diseases where cancer and asthma are the most frequently analyzed non-infectious diseases. Across categories, articles from North America predominate, and in the category of spatial analysis of diseases an equal number of studies concern Asia. Conclusion: Spatial analysis of diseases and health service planning are well-established research areas. The development of future technologies and new application areas for GIS and data-gathering technologies such as GPS, smartphones, remote sensing etc. will be nudging the research in GIS and health.