Digital technology has changed the way in which students use visual materials in academic work and has increased the importance of visual literacy skills. This paper reports the findings of a research project examining undergraduate and graduate students' visual literacy skills and use of images in the context of academic work. The study explored types of visual resources used, the role that images play in academic papers and presentations, and the ways students select, evaluate, and process images. The findings of the study indicate that students lack skills in selecting, evaluating, and using images. Students use a range of visual resources in their presentations but rarely use images in papers.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore how undergraduate and graduate students use visual resources in their papers and presentations and what role images play in their academic work. It also focused on analyzing the types of image use/reuse in academic work. Design/methodology/approach This study was designed using an exploratory, qualitative approach. In all, 15 participants were recruited. Multiple sources of data were collected, including visual evidence, questionnaires and interviews. It adopted consensual qualitative research for data analysis. Findings This study finds a prevalent reuse of images in student presentations but limited use and reuse in papers. Images in presentations were primarily reused as objects for engaging and esthetic purposes. Reuse of images as a source of information was not common and in some cases problematic when students were missing context. The type of use/reuse of images in the papers was more varied with examples of creative use and transformative reuse. Practical implications This paper contributes to a better understanding of how students use and reuse images for academic papers and presentations. Results have important implications for teaching visual literacy and re-purposing images in higher education. Originality/value This paper analyses educational use/reuse of images along the data/object spectrum and distinguishes between different types of image use and reuse.

Dynamic global vegetation models are used to predict the response of vegetation to climate change. They are essential for planning ecosystem management, understanding carbon cycle-climate feedbacks, and evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on global ecosystems. JULES (the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator) represents terrestrial processes in the UK Hadley Centre family of models and in the first generation UK Earth System Model. Previously, JULES represented five plant functional types (PFTs): broadleaf trees, needle-leaf trees, C 3 and C 4 grasses, and shrubs. This study addresses three developments in JULES. First, trees and shrubs were split into deciduous and evergreen PFTs to better represent the range of leaf life spans and metabolic capacities that exists in nature. Second, we distinguished between temperate and tropical broadleaf evergreen trees. These first two changes result in a new set of nine PFTs: tropical and temperate broadleaf evergreen trees, broadleaf deciduous trees, needle-leaf evergreen and deciduous trees, C 3 and C 4 grasses, and evergreen and deciduous shrubs. Third, using data from the TRY database, we updated the relationship between leaf nitrogen and the maximum rate of carboxylation of Rubisco (V cmax), and updated the leaf Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 2416 A. B. Harper et al.: Improved plant functional types in JULES turnover and growth rates to include a trade-off between leaf life span and leaf mass per unit area. Overall, the simulation of gross and net primary productivity (GPP and NPP, respectively) is improved with the nine PFTs when compared to FLUXNET sites, a global GPP data set based on FLUXNET, and MODIS NPP. Compared to the standard five PFTs, the new nine PFTs simulate a higher GPP and NPP, with the exception of C 3 grasses in cold environments and C 4 grasses that were previously over-productive. On a biome scale, GPP is improved for all eight biomes evaluated and NPP is improved for most biomes-the exceptions being the tropical forests, savannahs, and extratropical mixed forests where simulated NPP is too high. With the new PFTs, the global present-day GPP and NPP are 128 and 62 Pg C year −1 , respectively. We conclude that the inclusion of trait-based data and the evergreen/deciduous distinction has substantially improved productivity fluxes in JULES, in particular the representation of GPP. These developments increase the realism of JULES, enabling higher confidence in simulations of vegetation dynamics and carbon storage. * These are derived from other parameters. Here N a is g N m −2. impacts of climate change on global ecosystems. However, the use of DGVMs in ESMs is relatively rare. For example, of the nine coupled carbon cycle-climate models evaluated by Arora et al. (2013), only three distinct DGVMs interactively simulated changes in the spatial distribution of PFTs (the spatially explicit individual-based (SEIB)-DGVM, JS-BACH (the Jena Scheme for Biosphere-Atmosphere Coupling in Hamburg), and...

The task of writers of physiology textbooks is hard. When an unsuccessful first edition sinks to the remainder-strewn bottom it carries the unappreciated toil of years: and success hangs round the author's neck the heavy if lucrative millstone of continuous revision and rewriting. What may the teacher of physiology, himself immune from the textbook writer's itch, expect of those dedicated colleagues, whose publishers annually solicit his recommendation of their wares to pre-clinical students? He may ask that their accounts of physiology be complete, coherent, balanced and not over-long; that they should emphasise, but not unduly, human physiology and the clinical bearings of the subject; and that by judicious descriptions of original research they should constantly remind the student that physiology is an experimental science. In addition to these pedestrian minima, it would be well if the author's professional eminence were matched by an intellectual brilliance and mastery of style, such that the enlivening impress of his personality is conveyed to the reader in the limpid prose of a work of literature which will be remembered with gratitude by the student for the rest of his professional life. By these criteria none of the dozen British and American texts available to the student can be judged wholly successful, but the third edition of Bell, Davidson and Scarborough is as good as any and better than most.The rewriting of the text, though somewhat unevenly spread, has been much more extensive than the authors' modest claims in the preface. They rightly stress the close links between physiology and biochemistry, and the first ten chapters, on structural biochemistry, enzymes, biological oxidations and reductions and the chemistry and physiology of vitamins, are amply sufficient to make it unnecessary for students to use any additional biochemical text. The chapter on fat metabolism has benefited by the exclusion of outworn hypotheses and the section on the digestive system has been improved by the inclusion of recent work on oxyntic cell activity, the chemical phase of gastric secretion, intestinal motility, and some second thoughts on Frazer's partition hypothesis.In the chapters on blood the main alteration is the inclusion of recent concepts about the earlier stages of coagulation. The cardio-vascular system seems to have been less extensively revised, and students may be confused, when Starling's law relating the output of the heart to the diastolic length of the cardiac fibres has been correctly stated on page 446, to find McMichael's demonstration of the relationship between right atrial pressure and cardiac output cited on page 451 as confirmation of Starling's law on man. In fact convincing evidence that increased cardiac output in man is related to increased diastolic size of the heart is hard to come by. The minor alterations in the account of renal physiology are for the better, and the new chapter on body fluids provides a satisfactory but still elementary account of the electrolyte composition of b...

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