The study by Jiang, Zhang, Shen, Sun, and Zhao at Beijing Forestry University’s School of Landscape Architecture addresses this problem through the lens of green open spaces, the parks, riverside promenades, gardens, and vegetated buffers that line the canal and its branches. These spaces matter because they are where most people actually encounter the canal today. Few residents interact with the canal as a hydraulic system or as a listed monument, but large numbers of them walk, exercise, picnic, photograph, socialise, and consume within the green spaces that abut it. If the canal’s contemporary cultural significance is being produced anywhere, it is being produced in these everyday landscapes, which makes them a strategic site for understanding how heritage value is sustained or eroded in the decades after inscription.

The theoretical foundation the researchers draw upon combines two strands of thinking that have become influential in international heritage practice. The first is the Historic Urban Landscape approach, adopted by UNESCO in its 2011 Recommendation, which reframes urban heritage as the layered product of natural and cultural, tangible and intangible values interacting over time, rather than as a set of discrete protected objects. The second is the Cultural Values Model, which treats heritage as an assemblage of forms, practices, and relations, insisting that the meaning of a place emerges from the dynamic interplay among its physical attributes, the activities performed there, and the bonds people form with it and with each other. By fusing these frameworks, the authors construct an interpretative indicator system in which the green open spaces along a linear heritage corridor can be read as configurations of form, practice, and relation, and in which relational value becomes something that can be observed, classified, and measured rather than merely asserted.

Relational value, as operationalised in this research, unfolds across four observable dimensions: historical value, aesthetic appreciation, sense of place, and social interaction. This decomposition is analytically important. Historical value captures the extent to which a space communicates the canal’s past and anchors collective memory of it. Aesthetic appreciation registers the sensory and scenic experience of landscape. Sense of place concerns the emotional attachment and identity that individuals invest in a location. Social interaction describes the interpersonal life that a space supports, from casual encounters to organised group activity. Because these four dimensions can be inferred from the language people use when they write about a place, they lend themselves to computational analysis at a scale that interviews and site observation alone could never achieve.

The methodological engine of the study is natural language processing applied to social media content. The authors collected 85,244 posts referencing 61 green open spaces distributed along the Grand Canal, then trained and applied the Chinese-BERT-wwm model to classify the relational values expressed in those posts. BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a language model architecture that reads text in both directions, allowing it to grasp context on either side of each word, and the wwm variant, whole word masking, is a pre-training strategy particularly well suited to Chinese, in which word boundaries are not marked by spaces and multi-character words must be recognised as wholes. The model achieved an average classification accuracy of 91.20 percent across the value categories, a level of performance that the authors treat as sufficient for the downstream spatial and statistical analyses. The choice of social media data also carries an ethical logic: the analysis involved only secondary use of publicly available comments in de-identified form, with usernames removed, so no informed consent or participant recruitment was required.

The scale of the dataset deserves emphasis. Eighty-five thousand posts is far beyond what any coding team could process manually with consistency, and the 61 sites span the full length of the corridor, from canal-side parks in dense metropolitan districts to greener reaches in smaller historic towns. This breadth allows the study to make claims about the canal as a system rather than about a handful of celebrated showcase sites, which is a persistent weakness in much heritage research that concentrates on flagship locations while ignoring the ordinary spaces where the majority of visitation occurs.

The first headline finding concerns the relative prominence of the four relational values. Aesthetic appreciation emerged as the most frequently expressed value across the corridor, confirming that scenic quality remains the dominant currency through which the public engages with canal-side green space. Yet the more consequential finding may be the behaviour of historical value over time. Historical value displayed the strongest spatial heterogeneity among the four dimensions, varying sharply from site to site, and it increased overall during the decade following the 2014 World Heritage inscription. This temporal trajectory is encouraging for heritage managers because it suggests that inscription did not simply freeze the canal’s meaning at the moment of listing; rather, the intervening decade appears to have deepened the historical resonance that people perceive in canal spaces, plausibly through interpretive investment, media attention, and the gradual accumulation of commemorative practice.

The second finding organises the 61 sites into three spatial typologies derived through hierarchical clustering, an unsupervised statistical method that groups observations by similarity without imposing predefined categories. The Heritage Identity and Memory Category comprises spaces where historical value and sense of place dominate, typically locations with direct physical connections to canal history. The Eco-Aesthetic Appreciation Category gathers spaces where scenic and natural experience leads, often sites where vegetation and water dominate the sensory field. The Social Interaction Engagement Category contains spaces where interpersonal activity and consumption are the primary draw, generally more urbanised settings with commercial frontage. The practical implication of this typology is that a single management prescription applied uniformly along the corridor would misfire; a space whose value lies in memory requires different care from one whose value lies in sociability.

The third strand of findings dissects the mechanisms behind value formation at two levels. At the level of the green open spaces themselves, viewing activities were found to enhance historical value, which suggests that the act of looking at canal features, whether from viewing platforms, bridges, or waterfront edges, is itself a vehicle through which historical meaning is transmitted. Social interaction, by contrast, was driven by consumption activities, indicating that cafes, markets, and commercial amenities function as social catalysts rather than as mere commercial intrusions. Vegetation and water bodies generally fostered aesthetic appreciation, but with a notable exception: canal-related water bodies, meaning water surfaces directly associated with the canal itself, exhibited an inhibitory effect on aesthetic appreciation. The authors’ interpretation points to the canal’s working-water character, in which shipping traffic, engineered banks, and water quality issues can detract from the picturesque qualities that people seek in green space.

At the individual level, however, the picture reverses. Canal-related water bodies serve as core anchors for historical value and sense of place, meaning that the very waterway that suppresses scenic appreciation in some contexts is the element that binds people emotionally and historically to the canal. This duality is one of the study’s most transferable insights. The water is not simply an aesthetic asset or an aesthetic liability; it is a polyvalent element whose contribution depends on which relational value is at stake. Management that optimises for one dimension, for instance by screening the working waterway behind ornamental planting to improve views, may inadvertently weaken the authentic connection to the canal that anchors memory and identity.

For the broader field of linear heritage, the study demonstrates that relational values can be operationalised into observable dimensions and measured computationally, creating a framework the authors describe as robust and transferable. Linear cultural heritage exists worldwide in many forms, from railways and pilgrimage routes to irrigation systems and trade corridors, and each faces the same post-inscription challenge of keeping public relationships alive across vast distances. The Grand Canal case shows that the green open spaces threading along such corridors are not peripheral amenities but the primary arenas where heritage, public, and environment interact, and that reading those arenas through the forms, practices, and relations they embody can convert the abstract aspiration of sustainable heritage development into concrete, evidence-based management practice.

The research also contributes to a methodological conversation about how heritage scholarship can harness the vast textual traces that contemporary visitation leaves behind. Social media posts are imperfect proxies for experience, skewed toward certain demographics and certain kinds of expression, yet their volume and geographic coverage make them an indispensable complement to field methods. The 91.20 percent classification accuracy reported here indicates that large language models fine-tuned for Chinese can discriminate among value categories with enough fidelity for spatial analysis, and the approach of combining machine classification with clustering and spatial statistics offers a template that other corridors could replicate with their own corpora of public expression.

Finally, the study’s framing of heritage as continuous construction of symbiotic relationships, rather than as isolated preservation of physical vestiges, aligns with a decade of international practice that has progressively widened what counts as heritage and who counts as its stewards. The Grand Canal’s green open spaces, in this account, are where the canal’s future meaning is being negotiated daily, one walk, one photograph, and one conversation at a time, and the evidence assembled here gives managers along this corridor and beyond a vocabulary for shaping that negotiation deliberately.

Subject of Research: Shaping relational value in linear cultural heritage through green open spaces: insights from the Grand Canal

Article Title: Shaping relational value in linear cultural heritage through green open spaces: insights from the Grand Canal

Article References: Jiang, M., Zhang, S., Shen, Z., Sun, H., & Zhao, J. (2026). Shaping relational value in linear cultural heritage through green open spaces: insights from the Grand Canal. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09468-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09468-y

Keywords: Shaping, relational, value, linear, cultural, heritage, green, open, spaces, insights, Grand, Canal

The study’s theoretical engine is the field theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu described culture as a set of semi-autonomous fields—art, literature, academia, the mass media—each governed by its own rules, hierarchies, and forms of capital. Economic capital, the straightforward currency of money, can be converted into symbolic capital, the accumulated prestige that confers legitimacy, and back again, but only through mechanisms specific to each field. Consecration, in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, is the process by which institutions such as museums, festivals, critics, or state heritage bodies certify an object or practice as valuable. Sağlam’s central claim is that Şahmaran has been consecrated three times over, in three different registers, and that each consecration has recoded what the figure fundamentally means.

The first regime the study maps is artistic production. Livaneli’s 1993 film represents an auteur-driven engagement with the myth, one in which the figure is translated into the conventions of art cinema and positioned within a national cultural canon. In this field, value is attributed through authorial reputation, festival visibility, and critical discourse rather than through mass viewership. The myth’s serpent imagery and its associations with wisdom, healing, and hidden knowledge become raw material for an aesthetic project, and the resulting work accrues symbolic capital that can later be mobilized by other institutions. Sağlam treats this film not as a static adaptation but as an early act of legitimation that established Şahmaran as a figure worthy of serious cultural attention.

The second regime is heritage-oriented discourse, exemplified by the 2011 documentary Yarısı İnsan Yarısı Yılan. Here the mechanism of value attribution shifts from aesthetics to authenticity. Documentary framing, ethnographic authority, and the vocabulary of intangible cultural heritage recode Şahmaran as a piece of patrimony—something rooted in place, tradition, and collective memory that deserves preservation and recognition. This is a familiar maneuver in contemporary cultural politics, where folklore is converted into heritage and heritage into a resource for tourism, education, and national or regional identity. The study’s point is technical as much as interpretive: the same narrative figure that functioned as art-cinema material becomes, under documentary conditions, an artifact whose value lies in its claimed origins rather than in its formal innovation.

The third and most contemporary regime is platform-mediated popular media, represented by the Netflix series Şahmaran. Streaming platforms operate according to a different logic of consecration altogether, one in which value is measured through global reach, algorithmic visibility, subscriber engagement, and the branding power of a transnational service. When a local myth is translated into a prestige-style fantasy series for a worldwide audience, its signifiers are retooled for legibility across cultures: romance, spectacle, and genre conventions take center stage, while the figure’s regional embeddedness is packaged as exotic distinctiveness. Sağlam’s framework captures this as a conversion of cultural specificity into platform capital—the myth becomes valuable precisely because it can be simultaneously local in flavor and global in distribution.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is its insistence that Bourdieu’s model, developed in an era of national publishing houses and state cultural institutions, needs an upgrade for the streaming age. Bourdieu did account for the transformation of meaning as works moved between fields, but he did not treat media form itself as a structuring force in capital conversion. Sağlam argues that in contemporary media environments the format—a feature film, a documentary, a serialized platform drama—is not a neutral container. Each format carries its own institutional conditions, aesthetic conventions, and mechanisms of value attribution, and these shape what a translated myth can mean before a single interpretive choice is made. Media form, in this account, functions as a co-author of value.

The word translation in the study’s title is doing deliberate double duty. As a scholar based in a translation and interpreting department, Sağlam frames adaptation across media as translation in the broadest sense: not the word-for-word transfer between languages, but the recoding of a cultural figure as it passes between sign systems, genres, and institutional regimes. Each version of Şahmaran is a translation of prior versions, and each translation performs work that goes beyond fidelity to the source. It selects, amplifies, suppresses, and re-weights elements of the myth to satisfy the demands of the receiving field. The serpent queen who embodies esoteric knowledge in one regime becomes an emblem of heritage in another and a globally marketable fantasy property in a third.

This perspective has implications that extend well beyond a single myth. Scholars of adaptation have long noted that retellings reveal as much about the societies producing them as about the sources they adapt. Sağlam’s contribution is to give that observation a sociological mechanism: the production of value can be traced, field by field, through identifiable acts of consecration performed by identifiable institutions. The approach offers a template for studying other mobile cultural figures—folk heroes, legendary creatures, canonical epics—as they circulate through art houses, museums, heritage boards, and streaming catalogs. It also illuminates why contemporary folklore revivals so often feel contradictory: the same figure can be simultaneously preserved as authentic tradition and commodified as global content, because different fields are conferring different kinds of value on it at the same time.

The timing of the research is notable. The Netflix series concluded its run in 2024, and its international visibility made Şahmaran a household name far beyond the regions where the legend originated, from the Tarsus narratives associated with the figure to the wider Anatolian and Mesopotamian storytelling traditions. That global moment created the conditions for a retrospective analysis of the whole media trajectory, from the art cinema of the early 1990s through documentary heritage discourse to platform-era fantasy. The study, published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, was supported by the Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Firat University under project number İSBF.26.17, and the author declares no competing interests.

Ultimately, the research suggests that myths do not survive modernity by remaining unchanged; they survive by being useful. Each institutional regime that adopts Şahmaran extracts from the figure the kind of value it knows how to produce—prestige, authenticity, or reach—and in doing so adds a new layer to the character’s cultural biography. The half-human, half-serpent queen, a being of thresholds and hybridity, turns out to be an unusually apt symbol for this process, since her own dual nature mirrors the dual economies, local and global, symbolic and economic, that every adaptation must navigate. In tracing her passage across three decades of Turkish media, the study offers a compact demonstration of how culture is not merely transmitted but continuously re-priced, and how the price is set less by storytellers than by the fields in which they work.

Subject of Research: The transformation of the mythological figure Şahmaran and its cultural value across three Turkish media regimes

Article Title: Translating the myth: Şahmaran and the production of value across Turkish media

Article References: Sağlam, N. (2026). Translating the myth: Şahmaran and the production of value across Turkish media. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09347-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09347-6

Keywords: Şahmaran, Turkish media, Bourdieu, field theory, cultural value, adaptation, translation studies, heritage, Netflix, mythology, capital conversion, media form

The research, authored by Yukun Zhang of the Academy of Fine Arts at Weinan Normal University in China, addresses a fundamental tension in digital heritage protection. Watermarks must be imperceptible, because any visible alteration to dense patterns, delicate local decorations, or stylistic structures compromises both the aesthetic value and the cultural authenticity of the artwork. Yet watermarks must also be robust, because real-world transmission subjects images to platform compression, cropping, filtering, noise enhancement, and re-photography. If only robustness is emphasized, embedding disturbances can damage the fine local structures that make heritage art distinctive. If only invisibility is emphasized, the watermark quickly fails once the image is disseminated. Traditional watermarking schemes, the study argues, have never adequately modeled the full composite distortion distribution that heritage images actually encounter online.

Zhang’s solution begins with an attack simulator called the Hybrid-Adaptive Image Watermark Attack Network, or HAIWAN. Current protection methods typically rely on differentiable attack layers — simplified mathematical stand-ins for real transmission distortions — but these layers fail to capture the nonlinear, composite, and highly concealed nature of actual online interference. HAIWAN is designed as an independent strong-sample generator, deliberately separated from the watermark embedding backbone. During training, it continuously produces difficult attack samples that expand the distortion distribution the protection model must withstand. Crucially, because HAIWAN is excluded from the embedding and extraction processes during inference, it expands the training disturbance distribution without adding any computational cost to the deployed system.

Technically, HAIWAN reorganizes three components into a unified attack-generation path. First, a local stability enhancement unit — the Fast and Precise Block — applies residual feature updates while eliminating batch normalization, preserving the continuity of shallow perturbation features without heavy computational overhead. This architecture strengthens the network’s perception of local texture patterns, watermarks, and subtle texture correlations, which matters enormously for heritage artworks with dense patterns and delicate local ornaments. Second, parallel dilated convolution branches with multiple dilation rates replace continuous downsampling, expanding the receptive field while preserving the image’s main structure and capturing perturbation patterns at different spatial scales simultaneously. Third, constrained decoding and residual reconstruction convert the aggregated features into a deep perturbation residual that is added directly to the watermarked image. The result is an attack sample that retains recognizable structure — a weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio of 35.72 decibels and a structural similarity of 0.9187 — while inflicting maximum damage on watermark recovery.

How effective is this attack? Zhang compared HAIWAN against two baseline attack algorithms, WatermarkAttacker and WEvade, under unified inputs and consistent evaluation procedures. On three representative test images, HAIWAN produced bit error rates ranging from 18.18 to 20.98 percent and normalized correlation values from 75.21 to 77.97 percent — meaning it caused greater watermark extraction errors than either competitor. Notably, the normalized correlation values remained above 0.75, showing that substantial watermark correlation was preserved and the watermark was not completely removed. This is precisely the point: HAIWAN is not built as a weapon to strip watermarks from published images, but as a training adversary that generates difficult samples so the protection model learns to survive them. In cross-method generalization tests, HAIWAN maintained stronger destructive capability across different watermarking techniques, with bit error rates ranging from 0.5014 against a conventional DWT-DCT scheme to 0.3529 against the study’s own protection model — evidence that its multi-scale disturbance modeling interferes with both embedding traces and recovery features across diverse watermark mechanisms.

The second layer of the framework is the HAIWAN-guided Dual-domain Robust Blind Watermarking Protection model, abbreviated HDRB-WP. Rather than perturbing the full spatial domain — which risks irreversible damage to detail regions in texture-sensitive heritage images — the model exploits a dual-domain carrier built from the luminance channel. The luminance component retains principal intensity and contour information even after compression and screen recapture, so the low-frequency subband of the discrete wavelet transform provides a structurally stable embedding region. Within that subband, the discrete cosine transform maps the carrier into frequency-domain coefficients, allowing coefficient-level regulation of embedding modifications. This combination improves resistance to compression and filtering while reducing concentrated modification of the texture-sensitive regions that define heritage art.

Inside HDRB-WP, a Channel Attention Embedding Unit performs joint channel-spatial recalibration to decide where copyright information should be written. Channel attention emphasizes frequency-band information most relevant to copyright embedding, while spatial attention selects positions better suited to carrying hidden perturbations — effectively steering the watermark away from key decorative regions of the artwork. The embedding network then completes copyright writing through residual updates governed by an embedding strength coefficient. On the extraction side, a blind decoding network takes the dual-domain representation as input, uses residual feature enhancement as its core, and recovers the copyright mark under strong perturbation without requiring the original image. Training is driven by a joint optimization objective balancing image fidelity — measured with both pixel-level deviation and the perceptual LPIPS metric — watermark recovery through binary cross-entropy, adversarial constraints from a discriminator that pushes watermarked images to be indistinguishable from originals, and a robustness penalty computed over the full attack distribution.

The performance numbers are striking. The complete HDRB-WP model reduced the watermark bit error rate to 0.0169 and achieved watermark detection accuracy of 98.68 percent, outperforming the invertible-network IWRN scheme, which recorded 0.0284 and 97.26 percent respectively, and the single-encoder dual-decoder SEDD scheme. Under five conventional attack types — JPEG 50 compression, Gaussian noise, 3×3 median filtering, 10 percent cropping, and screen recapture — HDRB-WP controlled bit error rates within 0.0622 to 0.1119 on representative samples, while IWRN reached 0.1212 to 0.2248. The gap was most pronounced under screen recapture conditions, the scenario that most closely mimics real-world heritage image dissemination through display-camera recapture. Ablation experiments confirmed that every module contributes: removing the residual enhancement block degraded recovery accuracy, removing the dual-domain branch hurt both visual quality and recovery, and removing either the channel or spatial recalibration branch of the attention unit measurably weakened performance.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the attack-simulation approach comes from the guided training gain analysis. Before HAIWAN-guided training, HDRB-WP’s bit error rates under strong disturbances — JPEG 20, Gaussian noise with σ=30/255, 7×7 median filtering, 25 percent cropping, brightness adjustment of 1.35, and enhanced screen recapture — ranged from 15.48 to 29.87 percent. After attack simulation training, those rates dropped to 9.86 to 20.74 percent, with detection accuracy rising from 73.48–87.17 percent to 81.95–93.12 percent and normalized correlation climbing to as high as 0.9084. The improvements were largest under cropping and screen recapture, the distortions that conventional differentiable attack layers model least adequately. The deployed model remains lightweight: 4.89 million parameters, 29.63 milliseconds for embedding, and 17.38 milliseconds for extraction per image — fast enough for low-latency copyright verification in media-integrated communications.

The framework is not without limits. Under geometric desynchronization attacks — rotation of ±5 degrees, scaling by 0.75 or 1.25, 10 percent translation, and 5 percent perspective displacement — bit error rates ranged from 0.1816 to 0.2847, because HDRB-WP lacks a dedicated geometric registration module; crop and resize augmentation provides only partial tolerance. The study also notes that its reported robustness concerns payload recovery under transmission distortions rather than cryptographic resistance to key recovery, forgery, or collusion, and that intentional attacks still require complementary authentication and access-control mechanisms. Still, the implications for cultural heritage are significant. In exhibitions, the technique can protect the authenticity of intangible cultural heritage art as images circulate digitally; in online dissemination, it can support copyright verification after platform compression, image editing, and screen recapture. Zhang’s future work will pursue lightweight geometric synchronization and conflict-free multi-watermark allocation, enabling multiple institutions to verify collaborative copyright on the same heritage image. For a field where a single glaze pattern or embroidery stitch can embody centuries of cultural identity, an invisible mark that survives the internet’s full gauntlet may prove to be heritage’s most durable signature.

Subject of Research: Digital visual transmission and watermark protection of intangible cultural heritage art images based on the HAIWAN method

Article Title: Digital visual transmission and watermark protection of intangible cultural heritage art images based on the HAIWAN method

Article References: Zhang, Y. (2026). Digital visual transmission and watermark protection of intangible cultural heritage art images based on the HAIWAN method. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 6(1), Article 1537. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-026-02523-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44163-026-02523-2

Keywords: Digital, visual, transmission, watermark, protection, intangible, cultural, heritage, images, based, HAIWAN, method

The stakes are considerable. The GBMWHA, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, protects over one million hectares of vegetation celebrated for its Outstanding Universal Values, including ancient Gondwanan plant lineages found nowhere else on Earth. Yet rainforest represents only about one percent of the currently mapped vegetation in the reserve. When vegetation mapping fails to match what grows on the ground, management decisions such as prescribed burning, conservation prioritisation and threat mitigation are built on a distorted picture of where significant biodiversity actually resides. For fire-sensitive rainforest pockets embedded within flammable eucalypt forest, that distortion can be lethal.

The research team set out to validate the regulatory vegetation map units, known as Plant Community Types (PCTs), across the Hawkesbury subsection of the GBMWHA, an area bounded by the Colo, Nepean-Hawkesbury and Grose rivers and the township of Bilpin. The PCT classification is a major numerical undertaking: it was built from more than 90,000 floristic plots spanning 23.5 million hectares of eastern New South Wales, standardised to a modified six-point Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale, and embedded within the NSW State Vegetation Type Map (SVTM) that now underpins environmental regulation. Preliminary field survey, however, had hinted at large-scale mapping errors in the region’s remote gullies, where deep sheltered terrain and the moisture-rich Burralow Formation sediments create conditions favourable to rainforest.

To test whether the vegetation in these largely unsurveyed areas could be reliably matched to existing PCTs, the researchers deployed 55 plots across two complementary survey campaigns. Forty-six plots followed the standard NSW government technique for assessing cover and abundance within 20 by 20 metre quadrats, while nine larger circular plots of roughly 700 square metres quantified structural elements such as size class distributions and growth stages, with allometric equations scaling projected foliage area against stem diameter. Sites were stratified along an aridity gradient and split between two topographic positions: ‘Gully’ sites in deep sheltered locations near creeks, and ‘Bench’ sites at more elevated positions at the base of escarpments or on upper slopes. Crucially, the team also recorded bryophytes, the mosses, liverworts and hornworts typically overlooked in vegetation classification, through 15-minute active searches at 26 plots.

The statistical verdict was unambiguous. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling ordinations built on Bray-Curtis dissimilarity, the metric emulating the NSW PCT classification approach, the team found that their field plots occupied vacant ordination space defined by the established PCTs. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) confirmed that the two putative communities differed significantly in floristic composition from all locally mapped PCTs and from all plausible regional rainforest PCTs, with all p-values at or below 0.038 after false discovery rate correction. The results held under both Bray-Curtis and Gower dissimilarity indices, which treat Braun-Blanquet classes differently, demonstrating that the findings were not an artefact of metric choice. Permutational analysis of multivariate dispersion showed the new communities ranked among the tightest groups in ordination space, meaning their distinctiveness was not inflated by internal spread.

The team then ran their data through the NSW government’s Eastern NSW Plot to PCT Assignment Tool, the formal instrument used to meet regulatory obligations. The Tool returned best matches scattered across as many as eight different PCTs for the Gully plots and five for the Bench plots, with no coherent geographic or environmental story. The authors argue that such inconsistency, even when matches fall within the Tool’s statistical threshold of 0.695 distance-to-centroid, indicates a habitat the existing classification does not adequately capture. The 0.695 threshold, they note, represents the 95th percentile of distances for well-sampled PCTs and is designed to test statistical stability, not ecological distinctiveness. Floristically, the new communities sat closest to coastal rainforest types from the Illawarra and Central Coast regions, hundreds of kilometres away, rather than to any locally mapped rainforest.

Bryophyte data added an unexpected layer of discrimination. The 34 bryophyte species recorded separated the Gully and Bench communities in ordination space, with non-overlapping 95 percent confidence intervals around group centroids and a marginally significant PERMANOVA result. The moss Papillaria flavolimbata, which festoons tree branches in Bench rainforest, was never observed doing so in Gully rainforest, while several liverworts and hornworts such as Symphyogyna podophylla and Bazzania adnexa were restricted to creekside Gully sites. The authors suggest that integrating non-vascular plant data into community analysis could become a useful tool for Australian vegetation classification, though they caution that bryophytes varied more within communities than between them, likely reflecting fine-scale responses to moisture, substrate and light.

Spatial mapping revealed the true scale of the discrepancy. Using high-resolution aerial imagery, canopy height modelling and terrain analysis to isolate gullies and benches, then ground-truthing the output across two field campaigns, the team estimated a conservative minimum extent of 2,086 hectares of rainforest in the study area, against just 645 hectares documented in the SVTM. The overlap between the two mapping products was a mere 12 percent, implying the SVTM may carry a false positive rate exceeding 40 percent, which would push the actual increase in rainforest extent closer to seven or eight times the official figure. The team mapped over 40 distinct patches of Bench rainforest ranging from 1 to more than 30 hectares, and proposed two new vegetation types for inclusion in the PCT classification: ‘Hawkesbury Warm Sheltered Gully Rainforest’ and ‘Hawkesbury Subtropical-Dry Bench Rainforest’, intermediate forms bridging warm temperate, subtropical and dry rainforest.

The botanical significance of these communities is striking. Bench rainforest ranked highest in mean species richness among all regional rainforest PCTs with more than one reference site, and Gully rainforest ranked third. The communities harbour regionally rare species and notable range extensions, including the white cedar relative Dendrocnide photinophylla, apparently restricted to a single location with fewer than fifty living trees more than 100 kilometres from its nearest known population, and several hundred individuals of the Critically Endangered tree Rhodamnia rubescens across at least five populations. The team also recorded species such as Gmelina leichhardtii, Ficus henneana, Diospyros pentamera and Calanthe triplicata, many documented decades ago in botanical surveys of the Wheeny Creek area by ecologist Rosemary Floyd, whose historical records the authors argue were overlooked during the development of contemporary mapping.

The refugial story behind these rainforests is one of the study’s most compelling threads. As Australia drifted north and aridified from the Late Eocene, rainforest contracted under fire regimes favouring sclerophyllous species, persisting in pockets where conditions remained suitable. The Hawkesbury landscape, with mountain peaks receiving 1,200 to 1,300 millimetres of annual precipitation, deeply incised gorges and the semi-impermeable clay layers of the Burralow Formation acting as aquitards, appears to have buffered these assemblages from long-term climate drying and fire. The authors speculate that under past climates, more extensive rainforest links once existed between the Illawarra, Hawkesbury and Central Coast regions, dispersed along the hydrological conduit of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River and the movements of fruit-eating fauna.

That refugial buffering is now under threat. By 2090, the study region is predicted to warm by up to 3.4 degrees Celsius, lose up to 10 percent of annual rainfall and suffer more severe fire weather days. The Gully and Bench rainforests cover less than 1,000 hectares across four small subcatchments, making them acutely vulnerable to wildfires like those of 2019-2020, which affected hundreds of thousands of hectares. The researchers observed evidence that some rainforest patches within historical fire perimeters had been transformed into perpetual vine thickets with few large trees. Myrtle rust, the introduced pathogen Austropuccinia psidii, was consistently observed on Rhodamnia rubescens and other species, while invasive plants including Ochna serrulata and Lantana camara compete with threatened populations. Illegal four-wheel drive and mountain bike activity in the ridgetops of the Burralow, Wheeny and Gospers Creek catchments risks igniting unplanned fires and transporting weeds and pathogens into undisturbed areas.

The authors urge rapid revision of the PCT mapping and targeted measures to protect the remaining patches, warning that fires and urban development pressures will likely threaten the integrity of these rainforests in future. Prescribed burning is implemented across the region to reduce wildfire risk to lives and property, and rapid urban expansion is converting former rural lands to housing at the bushland interface, raising the probability of unplanned ignitions. Because 65 percent of the surveyed rainforest sites are officially mapped as sclerophyll forest, there is a material risk of off-target impacts from fire management activities within the World Heritage Area. The new community descriptions, diagnostic species lists and revised mapping provide land managers with the tools to plan burns around rainforest boundaries and to conserve what the authors describe as remnants that hold the stories of plant evolution over geological time, contributing more to the Outstanding Universal Values of the World Heritage Area than has previously been ascribed.

Subject of Research: Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia

Article Title: Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia

Article References: Bendall, E. R., Wong, V., Bell, S. A. J., & Gallagher, R. V. (2026). Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 7, 103-125. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.186732

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/VCS.186732

Keywords: Identification, distinctive, rainforest, communities, Greater, Blue, Mountains, World, Heritage, Area, Australia, scientific research

Henan Province, located in central China, spans the Yellow, Huai, Hai, and Yangtze river basins. Its west-to-east topographic gradient, dense plain river network, mountainous headwater areas, and long history of river-basin-based settlement development create substantial environmental and historical variation within a single administrative region. The expansion of railway and highway transport weakened the contemporary transport function of many inland rivers, but recent low-carbon transport policies and the continued role of waterway infrastructure in regional economic geography—including Henan Province’s ‘11246’ project—have renewed attention to inland navigation. As river corridors are reconsidered for transport and waterfront development, planning must also determine how water-network conditions correspond to the contemporary vitality of nearby heritage.

Existing inland-waterway research focuses primarily on engineering capacity, port and logistics performance, regional economic spillovers, and environmental effects. These frameworks explain how waterway infrastructure affects transport efficiency and regional development, but they usually treat cultural heritage as a background resource or an additional development sector rather than a principal evaluative dimension. Spatial cultural-heritage research has developed point-pattern analysis, accessibility evaluation, corridor and network identification, and multivariable explanations of heritage distribution, but these approaches rarely examine the relationship between those sites and contemporary inland water networks. Heritage-vitality and attractiveness studies use visitation, online attention, public services, and surrounding urban activity to evaluate contemporary heritage use, but generally do not place that activity within river-network and waterfront environments.

The study asks three questions: how are historically accumulated heritage resources organized spatially under the prespecified DBSCAN baseline, and how sensitive is that organization to parameter changes; where do heritage-vitality density and river-network density show synergy or directional mismatch across grid scales; and how do six explicitly defined site-level conditions relate to heritage vitality in global spatial models and geographically varying local models. These questions form one analytical chain: pure-spatial DBSCAN establishes the inherited spatial organization of heritage resources; KDE and bivariate Moran analysis identify province-wide river-network-vitality synergy and mismatch; OLS, spatial lag, and spatial error models provide the global site-level baseline and account for spatial dependence, while GWR and Monte Carlo tests identify geographic variation in the site-level relationships; LCR-GWR then evaluates whether the local coefficient surfaces remain stable under local collinearity.

DBSCAN revealed a dominant central-western agglomeration belt extending from Zhengzhou to Luoyang and a more dispersed peripheral pattern. The largest cluster contains 207 sites and connects the Zhengzhou-Luoyang concentrations into a broad central-western belt. Separate compact clusters occur around Kaifeng and Anyang. The Shangqiu cluster is dominated by the Han Liang royal mausoleums, while the Zhumadian cluster is dominated by the Zhugou revolutionary heritage complex; smaller northern clusters contain different combinations of city, tomb, temple, and settlement sites. These compositions show that the clusters represent several historical processes rather than one waterway-related heritage type. Noise points are more common in peripheral areas including Nanyang, Xinyang, and Sanmenxia, indicating dispersed spatial organization outside the principal density concentrations. Across the 15 prespecified parameter combinations, DBSCAN produced 2–13 clusters, showing that cluster boundaries depend on neighborhood scale and minimum cluster size.

At the 5-km grid scale, heritage-vitality density and river-network density showed a positive global spatial association (bivariate Moran’s I = 0.2109; permutation p = 0.001). High vitality–high river-network configurations occurred in parts of the central and northern plains, high river-network–low vitality configurations in parts of the eastern and southern plains, and several heritage agglomerations displayed high vitality despite low river-network density. Global bivariate Moran’s I values on the 2.5- and 10-km grids were 0.212908 and 0.206348, respectively, showing that the province-wide association and the coexistence of synergy and mismatch are stable across the three tested scales. Under the 14 one-at-a-time ±20% perturbations, Spearman’s ρ with the baseline ranged from 0.9983 to 1.0000, top-quintile overlap ranged from 94.7% to 100.0%, and global Moran’s I ranged from 0.3655 to 0.3850, compared with 0.3758 for the baseline. Moderate reweighting therefore preserves the principal site ranking and spatial autocorrelation pattern, while omission of a complete information component defines a clearer sensitivity boundary.

The OLS model is statistically significant overall, but its adjusted R² is 0.1201. A single province-wide combination of the six measured conditions therefore explains only a limited share of contemporary heritage vitality, leaving substantial variation associated with socioeconomic conditions, governance, visitor flows, conservation investment, and measurement factors. The Jarque-Bera test rejects residual normality. OLS residuals also remain significantly spatially autocorrelated under the primary symmetric 8-nearest-neighbor weights (Moran’s I = 0.3518; permutation p = 0.001). The significant LM-lag, robust LM-lag, LM-error, and robust LM-error tests show that the unexplained variation has a global spatial structure and justify comparison with spatial lag and spatial error models. Across k = 6, 8, 10, and 12, both models reduce residual spatial dependence relative to OLS. At k = 8, the spatial lag model has ρ = 0.6681 and the spatial error model has λ = 0.7144, and the filtered residuals are nonsignificant.

Adjusted R² increased from 0.1201 for OLS to 0.6000 for GWR, showing that geographically varying coefficients captured substantially more variation in heritage vitality. The 35-nearest-neighbor adaptive bisquare GWR produced six local coefficient surfaces. The Monte Carlo and LCR-GWR diagnostics support local spatial interpretation for heritage agglomeration, riverbank-line richness, and riparian greenness. River cost distance and land transportation accessibility remain regional-level control variables, while the Topographic Wetness Index remains a terrain-background control. The 999-iteration Monte Carlo tests support spatial variation in heritage agglomeration (p = 0.001), land transportation accessibility (p = 0.001), riverbank-line richness (p = 0.001), and riparian greenness (p = 0.006). River cost distance is marginal at the 0.05 threshold (p = 0.051), and TWI is nonsignificant (p = 0.992). LCR-GWR was then applied to the same 371 observations, with a location-specific penalty activated at 328 sites. R² changed from 0.7531 to 0.7293 and RMSE from 0.0378 to 0.0396. The residual Moran’s I of the original GWR remained significantly negative (−0.0926; permutation p = 0.001).

Coefficients for heritage agglomeration, riverbank-line richness, and riparian greenness changed sign across the province, while their spatial patterns remained relatively consistent under LCR-GWR. Local coefficients for heritage agglomeration range from −0.1096 to 0.1160. Coefficients are negative in parts of central and eastern Henan and positive at several peripheral sites, indicating spatial differentiation in the relationship between heritage agglomeration and vitality. Local coefficients for riverbank-line richness range from −1.3545 to 7.1865, with localized positive concentrations coexisting with extensive areas whose coefficients are close to zero. Local coefficients for the riparian greenness proxy range from −1.8595 to 1.0468, with negative coefficients predominating while some sites have positive coefficients, indicating spatial differentiation in the relationship between riparian greenness and heritage vitality. Together, the regional configurations and local coefficients show how heritage organization, riverbank form, and riparian ecology differentiate river-network–vitality relationships across the province.

The planning diagnosis combines the three river-network-vitality configurations with the robust GWR and LCR-GWR coefficient surfaces. The configurations identify the regional planning problem, while heritage agglomeration, riverbank-line richness, and riparian greenness identify the site-level conditions for field investigation. In high vitality-high river-network areas, planning should coordinate heritage use, river-corridor conditions, and service carrying capacity. Riverbank-line richness and riparian greenness can guide waterfront landscape, vegetation, water-quality, viewshed, and habitat surveys, while local evidence determines whether interpretation or recreational improvements are appropriate. In high river-network-low vitality areas, field investigation should examine heritage visibility, service provision, governance, and conservation investment. Physical interventions should also be evaluated against slope stability, flood exposure, water-erosion risk, and habitat continuity. High vitality-low river-network areas show that contemporary activation may depend more strongly on urban services, cultural communication, heritage agglomeration, or other local conditions than on dense river-network settings. Reversals in the heritage-agglomeration coefficients can guide comparison of coordination, service allocation, and competition among nearby sites. The study advances river-basin heritage analysis from resource mapping to the diagnosis of contemporary activation, providing a methodological reference for corresponding spatial comparisons in other river basins.

Subject of Research: Science

Article Title: Integrating cultural heritage into inland waterway revitalization: spatial heterogeneity and differentiated planning strategies in Henan, China

Article References: Li, H., Bai, Q., Song, Y., & Zhang, X. (2026). Integrating cultural heritage into inland waterway revitalization: spatial heterogeneity and differentiated planning strategies in Henan, China. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 14, Article 1928710. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1928710

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1928710

Keywords: cultural heritage, inland waterways, spatial analysis, geographically weighted regression, Henan, river basins, spatial planning, China, Integrating, cultural, heritage, inland

The ontological argument offered by Song and Evans deserves particular attention because it provides a vocabulary for a problem that is often discussed only in practical terms. Heidegger’s distinction between objects that merely stand at our disposal and things that gather a world of relations around themselves maps onto a genuine dilemma in virtual museology. A high-resolution 3D scan of a vessel, a manuscript, or an architectural fragment can be reproduced endlessly, transmitted instantly, and rendered in any environment a developer chooses, yet none of these operations automatically preserve the web of provenance, ritual use, historical circumstance, and scholarly interpretation that gives the original its significance. The claim that artefacts acquire meaning through gathered relations rather than intrinsic physical properties implies that the digital replica is not inherently impoverished; it is impoverished only if the relations are not carried across. This reframes the curator’s task: the question is no longer whether a digital surrogate can substitute for the original, but whether the curatorial apparatus that assembles meaning around the object can be extended into the virtual environment without being dissolved by it.

The empirical findings from Furusawa and colleagues on embodiment and aesthetic response add an important corrective to a common assumption in personalisation research. Much of the literature on adaptive museum systems treats the visitor as a bundle of preferences to be inferred: prior knowledge, dwell time, interaction history, stated interests. The finding that aesthetic and emotional response varies substantially with embodied locomotion and the physical scale of artworks, independently of where visitors direct their gaze, suggests that preference-based models capture only part of what shapes the experience. Two visitors may attend to precisely the same visual features of a painting yet undergo markedly different affective experiences because one approached it slowly across a large gallery while the other encountered it as a small reproduction during rapid movement. For AI-driven personalisation this implies that the sensor suite and the underlying model must extend beyond attention tracking into the domain of the body: gait, posture, proximity, and the kinesthetics of movement through space. It also implies that the design of the virtual environment itself, including room dimensions and the scale at which artworks are presented, is not a neutral container for personalisation but an active variable in the emotional outcome the system is trying to modulate.

The Museu XYZ case study raises questions that extend well beyond blockchain technology into the political economy of virtual museums. Decentralised curatorial models, in which authority is distributed among artists and communities rather than vested in a single institution, align naturally with the accessibility promises of the Metaverse: anyone with a connection can visit, contribute, and in principle shape the collection. Yet the dependence on cryptoart and NFT market logics means that the economic infrastructure of such museums is tied to speculative markets whose volatility and environmental costs have been extensively debated. A community-curated virtual museum whose exhibits are minted as tokens inherits the incentive structures of those tokens, including the possibility that curatorial decisions become entangled with asset valuation. This does not invalidate the model, but it illustrates the editorial’s central worry: commercial and infrastructural interests can encroach on curatorial judgement not through a dramatic takeover but through the quiet adoption of platforms and market mechanisms whose logics were designed for other purposes.

It is worth situating the AI Director concept of Çakmak and Çekmiş within the longer history of adaptive systems in cultural settings. Early adaptive hypermedia research in the 1990s explored personalised tour paths through digital collections, and subsequent decades produced increasingly sophisticated visitor models, from stereotype-based user profiles to machine-learned predictions of interest. What distinguishes the current generation is the coupling of these models with real-time control of the experience itself: not merely recommending which artefact to view next, but adjusting narrative pacing, feedback timing, and interaction modality on the fly. The finding that this works best when artefact identity and narrative structure are fixed by design is a genuinely useful design principle. It suggests that the appropriate division of labour between human and machine is not a question of how much authority to delegate in the abstract, but of identifying which layers of the experience are load-bearing for meaning and must therefore remain invariant, and which layers can safely vary in response to inferred visitor states. Personalisation, on this view, is not the opposite of curatorial intent but operates within a space that curatorial intent defines.

The question of affective computing in museums also merits careful treatment. Systems that infer emotion from facial expression, voice, posture, or physiological signals promise a form of responsiveness that no human docent could scale to thousands of visitors, and there is genuine evidence that emotionally adaptive experiences can increase engagement and recall. But the inference of inner states from external signals remains scientifically contested, with documented biases across cultures, ages, and individual differences in expressiveness. A system that misreads a visitor’s contemplative stillness as boredom, or their culturally specific expression of reverence as confusion, may adapt the experience in ways that distort rather than support the encounter with heritage. The ethical stakes are heightened in cultural settings, where the emotional register of an encounter with sacred objects, traumatic histories, or ancestral artefacts is not incidental but constitutive of their meaning. Institutions deploying such systems will need not only technical validation but also transparency about what is being sensed, what is being inferred, and what the visitor can control.

The editorial’s call for comparative studies across curatorial models deserves elaboration, because the field’s evidence base remains thin in characteristic ways. Most published evaluations of XR heritage experiences are single-site, short-duration studies with small samples, often conducted with visitors who are already technologically enthusiastic. Non-adaptive baselines are frequently absent, making it difficult to attribute observed benefits to the AI component rather than to novelty effects or the general appeal of immersive media. Longitudinal evaluation across repeated visits is especially rare, yet the value of a museum experience may lie less in a single memorable session than in whether it motivates return visits, sustained learning, or changed attitudes toward heritage. Comparative designs that hold content constant while varying the curatorial model, from centralised institutional control to decentralised community authorship, would begin to answer whether the ontological and political questions raised here have measurable experiential consequences.

The regulatory and economic dimension flagged in the editorial is likely to grow in importance as AI-driven curation matures. Cultural institutions increasingly depend on commercial platforms for the delivery of immersive experiences, and these platforms accumulate data about visitor behaviour that has value far beyond the museum’s own evaluative purposes. Questions of data governance, algorithmic transparency, and the terms under which cultural institutions delegate interpretive authority to third-party systems are not peripheral technicalities; they bear directly on the editorial’s question of whether AI assumes responsibility for curatorial intent in ways that serve the public or serve the infrastructure. Professional bodies in museology and digital heritage are only beginning to develop guidance for these arrangements, and the Research Topic’s insistence on sustained critical attention to economic structures provides a timely prompt for that work.

Finally, the vision of digital artefacts as first-class objects of curatorial, educational, and social interaction represents a significant reorientation for the field. Under the older surrogate model, the digital copy was judged by its fidelity to the original and its usefulness in lieu of a visit. Under the emerging model, a born-digital artwork, a procedurally reconstructed lost building, or a community-authored virtual exhibit may have no original at all, and its significance is established through the relations it gathers: the narratives it supports, the communities that curate it, the interactions it affords. This does not diminish the value of physical collections, but it does mean that the discipline’s theories, evaluation methods, and professional practices, developed largely around the primacy of the original object, will need continued adaptation. The contributions gathered in this Research Topic, spanning ontological theory, constrained implementation, decentralised experimentation, and embodied empirical study, offer a coherent starting point for that adaptation, and the questions they converge upon, about where meaning resides and who has authority over it, will remain live as the technologies mature.

Subject of Research: Editorial: AI-driven XR applications in cultural heritage: a new era of interactive museums

Article Title: Editorial: AI-driven XR applications in cultural heritage: a new era of interactive museums

Article References: Nofal, E., Hammady, R., & De Marco, R. (2026). Editorial: AI-driven XR applications in cultural heritage: a new era of interactive museums. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 7, Article 1990419. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2026.1990419

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frvir.2026.1990419

Keywords: Editorial, AI-driven, applications, cultural, heritage, interactive, museums, scientific research

The research, led by Pirjo Hamari of the Finnish Heritage Agency together with Pille Runnel and Agnes Aljas of the Estonian National Museum and Petri Uusikylä of the University of Vaasa, emerges from the Museums of Impact project funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme between 2019 and 2022. Rather than starting from academic theory alone, the team used an abductive, iterative design that moved continuously between empirical observation, practical development workshops and theoretical interpretation, engaging more than 1,000 museum professionals across Europe in co-creation workshops before piloting draft versions in six museums of varying size, ambition and national context.

The starting point for the framework is a diagnosis of how museum development is currently practised. The authors identify three interrelated approaches that dominate the field. The managerial approach treats the operating environment as predictable and stable, prioritises supply-driven planning, values hierarchical expertise and relies on quantified performance indicators and accreditation. The audience-centric approach, which gained momentum as public funding declined, reorients museums around visitors as active participants in knowledge production, emphasising co-creation, service responsiveness and outcome-oriented feedback. The systems approach, the least institutionalised of the three, views museums as dynamic, complex and interdependent entities in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, favouring collective intelligence, networked leadership and long-term public value over linear cause-and-effect planning.

Crucially, the authors stress that these are not competing ideologies but complementary organisational logics that coexist in every institution. Each museum must balance managerial, audience and public demands, and each approach implies a different relationship with uncertainty. Where the managerial model copes with change through forecasting and scenario planning, the audience-centric model demands agility, and the systemic model embraces turbulence by emphasising interdependence and cascading effects. The MOI framework is deliberately designed to work across all three, making the underlying assumptions of each visible rather than imposing a single template.

What distinguishes the MOI framework from existing tools such as the Arts Council England Impact and Insight Toolkit or national accreditation schemes is its direction of travel. Those instruments, the authors argue, are oriented towards external assessment, benchmarking and post-delivery measurement of results. The MOI framework instead operates as an internally driven developmental tool, drawing on Michael Patton’s concept of developmental evaluation, which supports social innovators working in complex, uncertain environments by providing real-time feedback that feeds a continuous development loop. In contrast to positivist evaluation theory, developmental evaluation does not prioritise statistical objectivity or the independence of the evaluator; it embeds evaluation inside the organisation’s own learning processes.

Structurally, the framework consists of two sections and eight modules containing 151 evaluative statements. Four Enabler modules examine internal organisational dimensions: impact goals and strategy, organisational culture and competences, resources and service development, and digital engagement. Four Impact modules address the museum’s broader societal role: communities and shared heritage, relevant and reliable knowledge, societal relevance, and sustainable organisations and societies. Each statement is scored on a scale from one to five, where one signals that a topic is insufficiently addressed and five indicates it is well established and evidence-backed. The scoring is not meant to produce a ranking but to surface strengths and development priorities through structured dialogue.

The evaluation process unfolds in three stages: preparation, facilitation and reflection. The modular design allows institutions to engage with individual modules, subtopics or selected statements rather than attempting the entire framework in one intensive session, and there is no prescribed way to use it. Once the evaluation is complete, a complementary Development Workbook guides museums through five practical steps: identifying a limited number of development goals, describing concretely what must change, mapping information gaps, clarifying resources and responsibilities, and setting the urgency of the development timeline. The framework is available in three usable formats with guidelines published by the Network of European Museum Organisations.

Two use cases illustrate the framework’s reach. A small Estonian local museum with only two employees used the tool to build an organisational strategy, and the process extended beyond internal reflection to involve the local municipality and other stakeholders, at one point spilling into the local newspaper as roles and expectations were negotiated. According to a museum staff member quoted in the study, the model enabled the staff, municipality and partners to jointly discuss all areas of museum work, agree on key communities and impact goals, and open discussions on sustainability and access, allowing the museum to look beyond purely economic aspects. Separately, the Finnish Music Archives applied the framework alongside the Europeana Impact Playbook, finding that although the 151 statements were designed for museums, most transferred well to a small archival organisation and surfaced perspectives that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

The theoretical ambition of the paper goes beyond tool-building. The authors frame the framework through three interconnected concepts: impact, public value and developmental evaluation. Impact is defined as the portion of total outcomes that occurred as a result of an organisation’s activity, above and beyond what would have happened anyway, encompassing educational, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Public value refers to benefits a museum creates beyond the immediate experience of its visitors, from educational opportunity and shared civic space to environmental sustainability and support for local tourism and creative industries. Museums, the authors note, operate simultaneously as cultural, public and economic institutions, and these roles can conflict, requiring negotiation in daily operations.

The learning theory underpinning the framework draws on Argyris and Schön’s hierarchy of single-loop, double-loop and triple-loop learning. Single-loop learning asks whether things are being done correctly; double-loop learning asks whether the right things are being done by examining root causes; triple-loop learning, or meta-learning, asks how we know we are doing the right things at all. The managerial approach typically operates at the single-loop level, the audience-centric approach combines single and double loops, and the systemic approach demands the continuous reflection and sense-making of triple-loop learning. The authors argue that shifting museums from a performance mindset of doing things right to an impact-oriented posture of doing the right things is the framework’s central contribution.

The authors are candid about limitations. Participatory development requires openness, reflection and what the study calls courageous discussions, and moving from linear, museum-centric development to a systemic one demands time, knowledge, leadership and appropriate tools. The framework is explicitly not a quality accreditation scheme or a traditional impact measurement instrument; it complements such approaches by addressing the larger organisational context in which impact is created. Yet its grounding in practice, its flexibility across institutions from two-person local museums to national archives, and its positioning of museums as the drivers of their own transformation suggest a sector beginning to rethink how change happens, not merely how it is reported. Whether the framework can catalyse genuinely systemic change across a fragmented European museum landscape remains an open question, but the study offers both the conceptual map and the practical toolkit for the journey.

Subject of Research: A co-created self-evaluation framework for organisational change and societal impact in museums

Article Title: The MOI impact framework: a catalyst for systemic change in museums

Article References: Hamari, P., Runnel, P., Uusikylä, P., & Aljas, A. (2026). The MOI impact framework: a catalyst for systemic change in museums. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 15698. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15698

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15698

Keywords: museums, impact evaluation, organisational change, developmental evaluation, systems thinking, public value, cultural management, self-evaluation, museum management, organisational learning, Creative Europe, heritage

The study, led by Huang and colleagues and published in Nature Cities, set out to test a question that has hovered at the edges of environmental psychology for decades: to what extent does the memory of historic urban spaces benefit the mental health of the people who have lived alongside them their entire lives? Rather than relying solely on questionnaires, the researchers deployed multimodal psychophysiological measurement, capturing simultaneous streams of data on how participants’ bodies and nervous systems responded to encounters with places layered with personal and collective history. This approach matters because self-reported well-being, while valuable, is vulnerable to recall bias, social desirability and the difficulty of articulating feelings that are often pre-verbal. Physiological signals, by contrast, register the response as it unfolds.

The technical logic behind such measurements draws on a long tradition in environmental psychology and neuroscience. Since Roger Ulrich’s influential work in the early 1990s on how natural and built scenes affect stress recovery, researchers have used indicators such as skin conductance, heart rate variability and electroencephalography to gauge the autonomic and central nervous system correlates of restorative experience. Later studies, including the well-known work by Gregory Bratman and colleagues published in PNAS in 2015, showed that walks in natural settings can reduce rumination and activity in a region of the prefrontal cortex associated with negative self-focus. The new study extends this psychophysiological toolkit into territory that restoration research has largely overlooked: not green space, but the historic, memory-saturated fabric of the city itself.

Urban memory, as the concept has developed in the literature, encompasses more than individual recollection. It includes place attachment, the emotional bond between person and setting described in foundational work by Scannell and Gifford, and the collective dimension of place memory explored by Maria Lewicka, who has argued that the past of a place, whether experienced directly or inherited through stories, shapes present-day identity and attachment. For older adults, these bonds can be especially consequential. Research on ageing in place, including studies by Power and Smyth on older people’s experiences of neighbourhood change, has documented how disruption of familiar environments can undermine well-being, while continuity of place supports identity, autonomy and social connection. The new experimental findings give this correlational picture a sharper causal edge: when older lifelong residents engaged with spaces that carry their memories, measurable indicators of mental health improved.

The setting of the research is itself instructive. Hong Kong, where both the underlying study’s context and Jiang’s commentary are rooted, is a city undergoing relentless transformation, its harbourfronts and historic districts remade decade after decade. The commentary is accompanied by paired images of Victoria Harbour, one historical and one contemporary, a visual juxtaposition that captures the central tension of the research: the same place can be simultaneously continuous and unrecognisable. In cities like this, the question of what is lost, retained or reinvented in the urban memory of long-term residents is not academic. It bears directly on planning decisions about heritage conservation, waterfront redevelopment and the pace of renewal in neighbourhoods where the same families have lived for generations.

Methodologically, the use of virtual and mediated environments deserves attention. The study’s approach aligns with a body of work on virtual reality as a scientific instrument, described in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience article by Bohil, Alicea and Biocca on how immersive virtual environments allow researchers to control stimuli with experimental precision while preserving ecological validity. For research on urban memory, this is a crucial methodological advance. Historic places may be physically altered or demolished, and older participants may face mobility constraints, so the ability to present controlled, reproducible encounters with remembered urban spaces, whether through imagery, immersive displays or carefully staged field settings, opens a path to experiments that would otherwise be impossible. The multimodal measurement strategy then links these controlled exposures to objective psychophysiological outcomes rather than relying on retrospective self-report alone.

The findings also speak to a broader and sometimes uneasy literature on how urban environments affect the brain and mind. A landmark 2011 study by Lederbogen and colleagues in Nature found that city living and urban upbringing were associated with differential stress processing in the brain, including heightened amygdala activity, and subsequent work by Tost and colleagues argued that urbanicity should be treated as a substantive factor in mental health research. Much of this literature frames the city as a stressor, a source of noise, crowding and social strain. The new study complicates that narrative in an important way. The city is not only a source of stress; for those who have accumulated a lifetime of memory within it, the urban environment can also be a reservoir of psychological resource. The same streets that may strain a newcomer can steady a lifelong resident, because memory transforms mere space into place.

Jiang’s commentary situates the findings within a research programme that connects landscape architecture, public health and environmental psychology, and frames them as a stimulus for further work and for practice. That framing points toward several open questions. The mechanisms linking remembered places to improved mental health remain to be fully specified: is the effect driven by restored attention, as attention restoration theory would predict; by reduced stress reactivity, consistent with stress recovery theory; by reinforcement of identity and social continuity; or by some combination of these pathways operating in parallel? The dose-response relationship is also unknown, as is the question of whether the benefits extend to residents whose neighbourhoods have changed so completely that the remembered city survives only in fragments. And while the study focused on older lifelong residents, it remains to be seen whether urban memory confers measurable benefits across the life course, or whether its protective effects accumulate with decades of residence.

The practical implications, if the findings replicate, are substantial. Heritage conservation is usually justified on cultural, historical and economic grounds, but this research suggests a public health rationale that is rarely invoked in planning documents: preserving the memory-bearing fabric of neighbourhoods may be a form of preventive mental health care for ageing populations. As cities worldwide urbanise and age simultaneously, with growing numbers of older residents who have spent their entire lives in rapidly changing environments, the intersection of urban memory and mental health is likely to move from a niche topic to a central concern of urban policy. Design approaches that retain landmarks, maintain social spaces and layer new development onto legible historic structure, rather than erasing and replacing wholesale, could be evaluated not only for their cultural value but for their measurable physiological effects on the people who live among them.

For now, the study stands as an early but consequential demonstration that the remembered city is a therapeutic object. By bringing multimodal psychophysiological measurement to bear on the question, the researchers have moved urban memory from the realm of memoir and nostalgia into the domain of testable, quantifiable health science. The image of an older resident standing at a harbour that is both the same and entirely different, body and mind responding in measurable ways to the accumulated past, captures a direction for the field: cities should be understood not only as environments that act on health from the outside, but as archives that residents carry within, and that can, under the right conditions, give something back.

Subject of Research: The effect of urban memory of historic city spaces on the mental health of older lifelong residents

Article Title: Urban memory and mental health

Article References: Jiang, B. (2026). Urban memory and mental health. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00526-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44284-026-00526-9

Keywords: urban memory, mental health, psychophysiology, place attachment, ageing, heritage, urban planning, environmental psychology, Hong Kong, Nature Cities, restoration, public health

The six sites studied form a cross-section of southern Thai cultural life. They include the Phra Phuttha Sihing and the Small Phra Phuttha Sihing Hall, both tied to venerated Buddha images; the Chao Pho Mahachai Shrine, a center of local spiritual devotion; Lha Thao Lan, a site of community memory; the Kinnaree Roundabout, a public landmark rooted in regional mythology; and a Thai Traditional House that preserves vernacular architecture and domestic wisdom. Each of these spaces, the study argues, carries layers of meaning that connect people to place. That connection, according to the theoretical lenses of Cultural Capital Theory, Place-Based Learning, and Community-Based Cultural Development, is precisely what makes cultural spaces promising vehicles for sustainability goals that purely technical interventions often fail to achieve.

The SOAR framework itself deserves attention, because it represents a deliberate departure from the more familiar SWOT analysis. Where SWOT asks managers to catalog weaknesses and threats, SOAR is grounded in appreciative inquiry, a methodology developed by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney that focuses on what an organization or place does well and builds strategy from that positive core. Strengths and Opportunities look inward and outward at present conditions, while Aspirations and Results orient stakeholders toward a shared vision of the future and the measurable outcomes that would signal progress. Researchers such as Jacqueline Stavros and Gina Hinrichs, who codified the approach in their 2009 book on strengths-based strategy, positioned SOAR as a way to energize planning processes rather than paralyze them with defensive risk lists. The framework has since been applied to sustainable tourism planning and organizational development, but its extension to university cultural spaces is novel.

To generate the data, Khaenamkhaew combined three qualitative methods: documentary analysis of records related to the sites, non-participant observation of how the spaces are actually used, and in-depth interviews with 24 people, including university administrators, lecturers, and support personnel. The interview count aligns with established guidance in qualitative methodology, notably the widely cited work of Greg Guest and colleagues on data saturation, which suggests that thematic saturation in relatively homogeneous groups often emerges within roughly a dozen interviews. The material was then subjected to qualitative content analysis organized around the four SOAR dimensions. The study followed Thai national guidelines for human research in the behavioral and social sciences, with informed consent, voluntary participation, and anonymity maintained throughout, and the researcher determined the work fell within categories exempt from formal ethics committee review under those guidelines.

The Strengths dimension surfaced a rich inventory of cultural assets. Participants described the sites as embodiments of local identity and spiritual values, and crucially, as repositories of environmental wisdom embedded in community practice. Sacred groves, shrine precincts, and traditional houses in Thailand frequently encode centuries of ecological knowledge, from water management to the selection of building materials, and the interviewees recognized these spaces as places where such knowledge remains visible and teachable. In the language of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, these sites function as cultural capital that can be converted into educational and social value. The study’s framing suggests that a Buddha hall or a traditional house is not a static monument but a living classroom whose authority derives from community trust rather than institutional mandate.

The Opportunities dimension pointed toward place-based learning, a pedagogical movement associated with educator David Gruenewald, who argued in 2003 that education should be rooted in the specific ecological and cultural characteristics of a location. For a university, the six campus sites offer ready-made venues for courses that connect Buddhist teachings on interdependence with conservation ethics, or that use traditional agricultural practices preserved in community memory as models for sustainable farming. Participants also saw openings for agricultural promotion, an agenda with particular resonance in a region where farming livelihoods intersect with cultural traditions, and for deeper university–community collaboration in which the campus serves as a convener rather than a gatekeeper. The study positions these opportunities as realistic extensions of what the spaces already do, rather than speculative repurposing.

The Aspirations dimension captured what stakeholders want these spaces to become. Interviewees expressed a desire to expand the educational and sustainability functions of the cultural sites, transforming them from passive heritage into active infrastructure for learning. This aspiration reflects a broader shift in higher education toward campuses as living laboratories, where sustainability is not only taught in lecture halls but demonstrated in the physical environment. In the Thai context, where universities often serve as anchors of regional identity, the aspiration carries additional weight: the cultural spaces belong as much to the surrounding community as to the institution, and their development as learning environments could strengthen town–gown relationships that benefit both sides.

An important methodological caveat runs through the Results dimension of the study. The anticipated outcomes, including enhanced environmental awareness, strengthened cultural identity, increased community participation, and expanded sustainability-oriented learning, are projections rather than measured effects. The study did not track whether visitors to the shrines subsequently adopted conservation behaviors or whether agricultural promotion initiatives materialized. This distinction matters for readers who might otherwise interpret the findings as evidence of impact. What the study establishes is a structured, evidence-informed map of potential, generated from the perceptions of people who manage and work alongside these spaces daily. Converting that potential into verified outcomes would require longitudinal or experimental follow-up, ideally measuring changes in environmental attitudes, participation rates, and agricultural practices over time.

The theoretical contribution of the work lies in extending SOAR into cultural sustainability, a domain where strategic planning tools are rarely applied. By combining the framework with Cultural Capital Theory, Place-Based Learning, and Community-Based Cultural Development, the study offers a template that other institutions could adapt. Universities across Southeast Asia and beyond hold comparable assets: historic buildings, memorial sites, sacred spaces, and examples of vernacular architecture that communities already visit and value. A SOAR-based analysis of such assets could help administrators identify which sites are best positioned to host conservation programming, which community partners should be involved, and what realistic outcomes should guide investment. The approach also aligns with a growing body of research on pro-environmental competencies in university students and on the role of cultural identity in shaping environmental behavior, suggesting that heritage and sustainability are complementary rather than competing agendas.

The study’s practical implications extend beyond the campus gates. In an era when environmental campaigns frequently struggle to overcome public apathy, culturally anchored spaces offer a channel of communication that bypasses the usual barriers of trust and relevance. A farmer who visits the Chao Pho Mahachai Shrine may be more receptive to a conversation about sustainable practices conducted on familiar, respected ground than to one delivered through an official pamphlet. The research, published on 6 October 2026 and available under DOI 10.1007/s43545-026-01804-y, ultimately argues that the greenest infrastructure a university possesses may already exist in the form of its shrines, halls, and traditional houses, waiting only for strategic vision to activate their latent educational power.

Subject of Research: Strategic analysis of university cultural spaces for environmental conservation and agricultural promotion using SOAR dimensions

Article Title: SOAR dimensions in strategic analysis of cultural spaces for environmental conservation and agricultural promotion

Article References: Khaenamkhaew, D. (2026). SOAR dimensions in strategic analysis of cultural spaces for environmental conservation and agricultural promotion. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01804-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01804-y

Keywords: SOAR framework, cultural spaces, environmental conservation, agricultural promotion, place-based learning, cultural capital, sustainability, higher education, Thailand, qualitative research, community engagement, heritage

Materialistic values, defined by the prominence people place on financial success, possessions, and physical appearance relative to other life priorities, have been extensively linked to poorer well-being. Meta-analytic evidence, including a large 2014 synthesis by Dittmar and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that a strong materialistic orientation is reliably associated with lower personal well-being. More recent meta-analytic work by Bradshaw and colleagues in 2023 extended this conclusion to the domain of life goals, finding universal wellness costs when people prioritize extrinsic goals over intrinsic ones. Understanding where these values come from, and how they are or are not passed down within families, therefore carries practical significance well beyond academic curiosity.

To probe the mechanisms of value transmission, the research team recruited 208 young adults, of whom 168 were women and 40 were men, with a mean age of 20.20 years and a standard deviation of 6.42 years. Participants, described as being in the stage of emerging adulthood theorized by Jeffrey Arnett, reported on their own materialistic values, their perceptions of their parents’ materialism, the parenting environment they grew up in, and their own life goals. Emerging adulthood is a developmental window in which identity, values, and long-term aspirations are still actively being shaped, making it a strategic period in which to examine the residue of family socialization.

Statistically, the study employed moderated mediation analysis, a regression-based framework popularized by Andrew Hayes that tests whether an indirect effect operates through a mediator and whether that indirect effect changes strength depending on a moderator. In this design, children’s materialism was modeled as the mediator linking parental materialism to children’s life goals, while the perceived family environment, specifically whether it was democratic or authoritarian in character, was tested as a moderator of the first path, the link between parental materialism and children’s own materialism. This architecture allowed the researchers to ask not merely whether parents influence children, but under what relational conditions that influence materializes.

The results delivered a surprise in the direct path. Parental materialism, on its own, did not predict whether the young adult participants endorsed extrinsic life goals centered on wealth, fame, or image. Values transmission, in other words, is not automatic. A materialistic parent does not reliably produce a materialistically driven child simply by existing as a role model. This finding echoes a broader literature on parent-child value similarity, including work by Barni, Knafo-Noam, and Schwartz, which shows that resemblance between parents and children on values is often modest and depends heavily on the quality of the relationship and the socialization context rather than on parental intentions alone.

The critical factor turned out to be the family environment. When participants perceived a democratic family climate, one characterized by warmth, dialogue, negotiation, and responsiveness to the child’s perspective, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was positive. In such homes, materialistic parents apparently modeled and communicated consumer values that children absorbed and internalized. In contrast, under an authoritarian family environment, marked by coercive control, strict demands, and limited open communication, the relationship between parental materialism and children’s materialism was negative. Children raised in authoritarian households were less likely to adopt their parents’ materialistic orientation, suggesting that value transmission requires a channel of influence that authoritarian climates appear to close.

The interpretation offered by the researchers is that the family environment enables or disables the transmission of materialistic values, and that these values, once adopted, guide young people’s focus toward extrinsic objectives. Theoretical frameworks from Grusec and Goodnow on value internalization help explain the pattern: children internalize parental values most effectively when they accurately perceive the values’ content and accept them, both of which are fostered by democratic, warm parenting and undermined by coercive discipline that provokes resistance rather than emulation. Related consumer research, such as Richins and Chaplin’s work on material parenting, similarly shows that how goods are used in the parenting process matters as much as parental attitudes toward possessions themselves.

Why might authoritarian parenting blunt materialistic transmission? One possibility is reactance: adolescents in controlling households may distance themselves from parental models, rejecting values associated with parents they experience as domineering. Another relates to emotional security, since prior research, including Ching and Wu’s study of parental conflict and adolescent materialism, suggests that insecurity can itself foster materialistic values as a compensatory mechanism, but the dynamics of that compensation may interact with parenting style in complex ways. The moderated mediation results indicate that materialism in children did serve as the conduit through which family conditions ultimately related to extrinsic life goals, meaning that the family climate shaped children’s materialism, and children’s materialism in turn shaped the goals they set for their lives.

The study’s limitations warrant caution in interpretation. The design was cross-sectional and correlational, relying on retrospective perceptions of parenting rather than observed family behavior, so causal direction cannot be firmly established; it is possible, for instance, that shared materialism produces a more relaxed family climate rather than the reverse. The sample was also skewed toward women, and all measures were self-reported by adult children, leaving parental perspectives unmeasured directly. The authors note that data supporting the findings are available from the corresponding author upon request, and the work followed ethical protocols including informed consent.

Nevertheless, the findings carry clear implications. For practitioners and parents concerned about the cultural pull of consumerism, the message is that values are not inherited through instruction alone but through relational climate. Democratic parenting appears to open a channel through which parental values, for better or worse, flow to children, which means the same openness that helps transmit generosity, curiosity, or civic engagement can also transmit materialism. Authoritarian environments, while perhaps limiting materialistic contagion, come with their own well-documented psychological costs. The broader takeaway is a call for intentionality: parents who wish to buffer their children against materialistic values may need to attend not only to their own consumption habits and stated ideals, but to the everyday emotional and communicative fabric of family life in which those values either take root or wither. As societies grapple with the well-being toll of extrinsic goal pursuit documented across cultures, this research suggests that the first and perhaps most powerful arena of intervention remains the home.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals traces back to self-determination theory, which holds that aspirations such as personal growth, close relationships, and community contribution tend to satisfy basic psychological needs, whereas pursuits of wealth, fame, and image offer only contingent satisfactions. The present findings suggest that the family is one setting where this goal orientation is calibrated long before individuals make deliberate choices about their priorities.

It is also worth noting that value transmission in families is rarely a one-way street. Research on parent-child value similarity indicates that children actively filter, negotiate, and sometimes reject what parents offer, and that perceived norms within the family shape whether parental messages are heard as genuine convictions or as mere expectations. The democratic climate in this study may function precisely as such a channel, giving children enough access to parental reasoning to reconstruct materialistic values as their own.

Future work could follow families over time, incorporate both parents’ and children’s reports, and test whether these dynamics hold across cultures with differing levels of consumer development, questions the authors’ data-sharing statement should help address.

Subject of Research: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article Title: Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals

Article References: Lins, S., Caria, M. A., & de Melo, C. F. (2026). Materialistic Heritage: The Influence of Parental Figures on Children’s Life Goals. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00536-5

Keywords: Materialistic, Heritage, Influence, Parental, Figures, Children, Life, Goals, scientific research