As the traffic demand increases at a faster rate than the upgrade and maintenance of
transportation facilities through the traditional public financing methods in the United
States, the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is becoming an important supplement to
the public transportation infrastructure investment. There are already several existing
PPP toll road...
Microfinance, or the technique of lending small amounts of money to the world's poor for productive activities, has emerged as a dominant approach to poverty alleviation among international development organizations. However, consensus does not yet exist as to the best mechanism for delivery of loans. While most organizations simply offer...
Urban sprawl and the establishment of greenbelts to separate growing cities and towns has become a popular topic of conversation among land use professionals. Economists focus on urban growth in terms of land rents and have sought market solutions such as transfers and purchases of development rights to slow this...
Recent catastrophic wildfires have forced the forest management community to develop new strategies for reducing forest fuels. Tightly spaced understory trees often create a fire ladder allowing surface fires to encroach into the crowns of overstory trees. This situation can lead to intensive, catastrophic, stand-replacement forest fires. Mechanical removal or...
This dissertation consists of three papers on agricultural nonpoint source pollution and control. The first paper focuses primarily on agricultural land use changes under alternative conservation policies. The second and third papers address environmental implications of these policies and their cost effectiveness. In the first paper, the effect of alternative...
New technology may have negative, as well as positive, effects on a sociocultural system. Biodiesel is growing in popularity as a fuel alternative that addresses global warming and reduces dependency on petroleum. The biodiesel innovation fits well into the existing behavioral infrastructure of Linn and Benton Counties, Oregon. The introduction...
The Tualatin River in northwest Oregon has been designated as water quality limited by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Restoration and enhancement of riparian areas to improve water quality is one task to be pursued by management agencies. This paper examines some of the potential costs and benefits of...
Wetland restoration mitigates effects of agricultural development on water quality, flooding, and habitat loss. Multi-objective optimization for wetland locations and sizes has not included objective functions for water quality, hydrology, and habitat in unison, limiting analysis of trade-offs among these ecosystem services. This study establishes two methods to improve the...
Moisture content management is a key requirement to improve forest harvest residue economics for bioenergy production. This dissertation aims to contribute towards better management through these three general objectives (1) Determine average moisture content of fresh forest harvest residues and its changes over the different seasons of the year, focusing...
Signs of climate change across the Pacific Northwest indicate changing patterns of timing and availability of stream flow. Declining summer low flows, decreasing snow pack, higher temperatures and an increasing fraction of mountain precipitation falling as rain, raise concerns about future reliability of stream flows. These changes will likely affect...