The development of a market for currently non-merchantable forest material, such as harvest residues of tops and limbs of trees or small diameter trees, has been suggested as a possible win-win solution that could: (i) provide a financial incentive to help motivate treatments to reduce wildfire risk or restore forest...
An integrated model combining a wildlife population simulation model, and timber harvest and growth models was developed to explore the tradeoffs between the likelihood of persistence of a wildlife species and timber harvest values on a landscape in the Central Oregon Cascades. Simulated annealing, a heuristic optimization technique, was used...
Forest management in the face of fire risk is a challenging problem because fire spreads across a landscape and because its occurrence is unpredictable. Additionally, management must be adjusted over time as unpredictable fire events are realized. Land managers have some control over the vegetation conditions that facilitate fire spread,...
This study seeks to explore the relationship between social capital and well-being in the rural Western United States. Mixed methods were employed to understand the concepts from multiple angles, using both profile and process indicators. An econometric approach used profile indicators and relied on data from 414 counties in the...
The goal of this study was to advance methods for assessment of forest road hydrologic
response and sediment yield at a catchment scale. This research looked at the effect of
soil depth estimation on the Distributive Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM),
assessed the uncertainty and accuracy of hydrologic modeling of...
............................................................................................. 13
Determining the Best Technique for Estimating Soil Depths for Claire Creek ............. 15
Alteration of natural areas in attempts to support increasing human populations has been a crucial yet less publicized contributor to the fall of many of the world's greatest civilizations, since healthy ecosystems can help maintain stable societies and economies. Given this unhappy fact and the ancient relationship between people and...
This paper presents a framework for analyzing efficient spatial allocation of forest
management efforts - fuel treatment and harvest - under the risk of fire. The framework
integrates a fire behavior model and a spatially-explicit stochastic dynamic optimization
model. I investigate the effects of spatial interaction across plots during forest...
In this dissertation, I examine how the spatial configuration of forest ownership influences the risk-mitigating behavior of public and private forestland owners over time. I determine whether or not the predicted equilibrium outcomes are socially optimal and, if not, whether the introduction of regulation, liability, or private insurance would lead...
Biological invasions threaten native biodiversity, alter ecosystem function, and are a major cause of economic losses across the planet. The most impactful invaders alter disturbance regimes and initiate state shifts to outside the historical range of variability of the ecosystem. Concern for ecological and economic losses has prompted a rapid...
All mammals host communities of commensal microbes in and on their bodies. Recent technological advances, combined with experimental studies in laboratory animals, are beginning to reveal the ubiquitous links between the gut microbiome and host disease, metabolism, immunity, and numerous other host functions. A new challenge of microbiome research is...