Forests provide a wide range of timber and non-timber products along with providing a range of ecological services and support for biodiversity. Climate change poses various risks to forest health, as it can disrupt tree growth functions and trigger natural disturbances that increase tree mortality. In recent decades, altered disturbance...
Oil is notorious for its volatility. Often as an indicator for economic wellbeing, the commodity employs millions across the country. Entire communities in the western United States are centered around oil extraction, with employment, livelihoods, and revenues dependent on oil’s success. This combination of factors begs the question, how do...
Developed coastlines provide a variety of recreation opportunities to coastal residents and visitors but are also the first line of defense for oceanfront development against chronic hazards like erosion and sea level rise. In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, oceanfront homes also face an additional severe but very...
Lone Lake is an approximately ninety acre lake in Langley, WA on Whidbey Island. Since 2008, Lone Lake has experienced a number of harmful cyanobacterial blooms (cyanoHABs). Since 2016, however, the intensity of these cyanoHABs have impacted both ecosystem functions and human activities in the watershed. In June of 2020,...
Managing agricultural diversity ensures a range of public services, such as genetic resource diversity, food security for subsistence-based economies, and landscape resilience in the context of climate change, among others. These agrobiodiversity conservation services are positive externalities from agrobiodiversity conservation. Whereas their value is not captured in market transactions, management...
This dissertation studies the microeconomics of forest fire suppression programs. It starts with an inquiry into the causes of increasing shares of public land management budgets devoted to wildland fire suppression in lieu of hazardous fuel reduction or other pre-fire risk mitigation programs. The first two chapters consider competing economic...
Remote sensing forest inventory gained increased attention in the last decade triggered by the decrease in the price of sensors and the explosion of data availability and formats. Evermore, the constant advances in the hardware processing the data emphasized the necessity to develop algorithms to extract forest relevant information from...
Decentralizing resource control for community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is a widely promoted scheme for natural resource governance worldwide. Researchers and policymakers have suggested that this approach has the potential to achieve positive social outcomes and succeed where centralized resource conservation has been inadequate. In reality, the powers transferred are...
Technological growth in agriculture increases crop output but it could lower output price in the market. Economic impact assessment in ex-ante analysis usually does not include these indirect supply responses, which can overestimate the economic potential of new technology. This dissertation provides an integrated farm-level ex-ante impact assessment model to...
There are three chapters of manuscripts in this dissertation and all of them are talking about a specific theme: stochastic control, but with completely different perspectives.
In the first manuscript, we solve the optimal barrier strategy for dividend distribution in a complicated Lévy system. In this system, the capital of...