A book entitled Mediterranean Island Landscapes: Natural and Cultural approaches has been published by Springer as part of its Landscape Series, which is dedicated to publishing manuscripts that approach the concept of landscape form a broad range of perspectives.

This latest book is the ninth in the series, and includes a chapter on the Maltese archipelago, authored by Dr Louis F. Cassar, Ms Elisabeth Conrad and Prof. Patrick J. Schembri. The chapter reviews the evolution of the semi-natural and cultural landscapes of the Maltese Islands, and discusses the impacts of recent environmental changes and implications for landscape conservation and management. The publication also includes case studies from Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, Corsica, Crete and the Balearic Islands, as well as conceptual and theoretical reviews of nature and culture in Mediterranean Islands, and discussions of future perspectives for landscape management in the region.

The book is edited by Dr I.N. Vogiatzakis, Dr G. Pungetti, and Dr A.M. Mannion.

A publication entitled Measuring sustainability: theory and experience from the Mediterranean has recently been released by the International Centre for Science and High Technology of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (ICS-UNIDO). 

The book is edited by Dr Louis F. Cassar and Ms Elisabeth Conrad of the International Environment Institute, University of Malta, together with Dr. Stephen Morse from the University of Reading, and brings together a collection of essays recounting experiences with sustainability. Although the rhetoric of sustainability has become of prominent feature of political discourse in recent times, there is much skepticism over actual implementation, and sustainability indicators have been developed to provide a yardstick of practical successes. However, sustainability indicators can be applied in various ways for different themes, and as is evident from the readings in this book, practices vary widely.

The book provides examples of applications from various localities, including Sardinia, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco and Malta, with discussions of the latter provided by Mr Anthony Ellul, Dr Louis F. Cassar, and Ms Elisabeth Conrad.  The publication is intended to foster critical thinking of the ways in which sustainability indicators have been developed and applied, enabling judicious evaluation of the success of strategies and techniques to date, and the formulation of guidance for desired future developments.

THE GOZO DISCOVERY BUS
by Maryrose Vella

As a result of an EU Project, in which the Islands and Small States Institute of the University of Malta is participating, a tourist discovery bus service was introduced in Gozo for a trial period of 3 weeks between the 16th July and 6 August 2008. The project is part of Interreg III B Archimed programmes.

Attracting Tourists to Gozo

The purpose of this service is to enable tourists to visit sites of major interest on the Island of Gozo that cannot be easily reached by public transport. The idea of this service had for long been debated by the Gozo Tourism Association and was then the result of several consultation meetings between local authorities and enterprises with an interest in tourism. This service is intended to encourage more tourists to visit the island of Gozo with an increased possibility of staying in local hotels rather than visiting the island for the day. Stayover tourist generate more employment and income in Gozo than is the case with day trippers, thus rendering the tourism industry in Gozo more sustainable.

This discovery bus service can also be useful to the Maltese tourists who visit Gozo. The service which is in the form of a hop-on hop-off is currently free of charge, but  only for this trial period. It is being proposed that this service will continue to operate at a modest fee.

Discovery Bus Stops

The buses leave Victoria from Sabina Square with final destination being Sabina Square. The timetable is as follows:

Victoria Ramla

                                   
As can be noticed from the timetable, there is a short interval at each destination where tourists can just go down and take some pictures and then board again to continue with the tour.


The Interreg Project

The aim of the Interreg project is to create a Standard for Sustainable Tourism in the Mediterranean. The other participating countries besides Malta are Italy, Cyprus, and Greece. The Islands and Small States Institute is representing Malta in this project, and it is hoped that it will pave the way for a permanent discovery bus system in Gozo.

Click here to view the poster.

Dear Colleagues,

I have been asked to collate a list of scientific publications by Maltese females as part of a European-wide effort to promote the output of females in the various member states.

The objective is to promote the output capacity of females and ensure that if expertise in an area is required, there is a good source to identify the experts and how they can be contacted.

Unlike other countries, in Malta we do not have a centralised database in which all publications are to be found.

For this purpose, it would be very useful if you could kindly forward to me a list of your publications in electronic format to my email address. These will be inserted in this European database and I am positive that Maltese females are bound to benefit from this exercise.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Sincerely yours,


Lydia Sciriha
Professor

Past issues of the Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies are available free of charge from in front of Room 226 in the Faculty of Education (across from HSBC, up one floor, corridor on left). There is a limited number of all the 24 issues that have been published since 1996, so do help yourselves if your personal collection has any of the volume numbers missing and you wish to complete the set.

Joel Azzopardi is reading for an MPhil/PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of Dr Chris Staff.

As part of his research he needs some evaluations and is therefore inviting the readers of News on Campus to visit an online portal and submit their evaluation online.

Jnews is a news portal built by Joel Azzopardi a Ph.D. student in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Malta, under the supervision of Dr Chris Staff.

The portal downloads news reports from different news sites, categorizes them according to the event they are reporting, and then constructs a fused report for each category of reports. An ideal fused report contains all the different details found in the source reports without repeating any information. Thus by reading a fused report, a reader will learn all the information present in the different reports without having to go through them all.

We invite you to visit the portal, and submit evaluation for the news report fusion system. The portal contains fused reports of the latest events, and one can submit evaluation forms for each fused report.  All evaluation forms are anonymous, and no personal information is collected. For more information, please contact Joel Azzopardi.

A First 'Health Check-Up' of a Marine Protected Area in the Making

MonItaMal Project
This assessment was undertaken within the framework of a project co-financed by the European Union through the Programme of Trans-boundary Cooperation INTERREG IIIA Italia-Malta. This project, MonItaMal, has been undertaken by a research consortium composed of two Italian research institutions, namely: Parco Scientifico e Tecnologico della Sicilia (Lead Partner) and Istituto Centrale di Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica Applicata al Mare (ICRAM). The Maltese partner in this project was the Department of Biology of the University of Malta.

The project MonItaMal aims at harmonizing and developing a common marine environmental monitoring system. The project was initiated in January 2006, and has already included a number of marine surveys undertaken in Lampedusa and in the marine protected area from Ras ir-Raheb to Rdum Majjiesa, which received particular attention throughout the undertaking of this project. A clearer, albeit preliminary picture of the state of health of this site has thus been achieved. The following sections contain a non-technical review of the information after the first surveys taken in summer of 2006.

Click here to access the information booklet on a research project.

Dr Joseph A. Borg and Prof. Patrick J. Schembri, both academic members of staff at the Department of Biology of the University of Malta, are co-authors of a chapter on 'Monitoring of Environmental Impacts of Marine Aquaculture' in a book titled 'Aquaculture in the Ecosystem' published recently by Springer.

This book has individually authored chapters addressing different aspects of the interactions between aquaculture and the environment, including integration of fish farming with other coastal activities, effects of the introduction of farmed fish into the environment, and new approaches to sustainable aquaculture practices; the second chapter of which Borg and Schembri are co-authors, concerns the environmental monitoring of aquaculture operations, and includes an overview of surveys  undertaken in the Maltese islands to monitor the effects of sea bream/sea bass farms and tuna penning activities on the environment.

The full reference to the chapter is:
Holmer M., Hansen P. K., Karakassis I., Borg J. A. & Schembri P. J. (2008). Monitoring of Environmental Impacts of Marine Aquaculture. In: Holmer M., Black K., Duarte C., Marba N., & Karakassis I. (editors) Aquaculture in the Ecosystem. pp. 47-85. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer; 326pp.
[ISBN: 978-1-4020-6809-6].

The Universities of Malta and of Palermo, in conjunction with Associations Italiques, are organising a bilingual international conference on L’île comme métaphore: transferts et échanges dans l’espace méditerranéen from 6 to 9 June 2008. The conference will be hosted by the University of Palermo from 6 to 7 June and by the University of Malta from 8 to 9 June.

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics concerning the concept of insularity, its influence on the cultural, artistic, economic, social, linguistic aspect, etc.; the poetic concept pertaining to the various declensions of the insular Mediterranean metaphor.

Detailed proposals (3 pages) in French or Italian should be sent to paolo.carile@wanadoo.fr by 15 March 2008. For further information please contact Dr Carmen Depasquale on email address carmen.depasquale@um.edu.mt

The administrator of the Xjenza-TV website requires images related to academic research, conducted in Malta and indicative of scientific areas of study, to use on the web pages of the site. The intention is to portray the scientific research that is being conducted within the Maltese context.

Anyone willing to share these types of images can send an email to Dr Pierre Schembri-Wismayer pierre.schembri-wismayer@um.edu.mt or Noah Agius (the project manager) noah.agius@um.edu.mt.