The quality of a digital image pipeline relies greatly on its color reproduction which should at a minimum handle the color constancy, and the final judgment of the excellence of the pipeline is made through subjective observations by humans.
This dissertation addresses a few topics surrounding the color processing of...
Private forest owners face an increasing risk of economic damage from extreme wildfires as the climate becomes warmer and drier. This thesis empirically estimates the influence of climate on private forest owners’ management decisions using plot-level data in the Pacific states of the U.S. Econometric models are specified where the...
The purpose of this descriptive case study analysis was to provide portraits of the methods college students used to solve probability problems and the factors that supported or impeded their success prior to and after two-week instruction on probability. Fourteen-question Pre- and Post-Instructional Task-Based Questionnaires provided verbal data of nine...
Diverse scientific fields collect multiple time series data to investigate the dynamical behavior of complex systems: atmospheric and climate science, geophysics, neuroscience, epidemiology, ecology, and environmental science. Identifying patterns of mutual dependence among such data generates valuable knowledge that can be applied either for inferential or forecasting purposes. Vector autoregressive...
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...
Our oceans surround us, and we depend upon them for food, transportation, and recreation. They affect us daily as they shape our climate and rattle our world with unexpected events. Current headlines indicate that they are in flux and perhaps in trouble. Coral reefs are dying due to rising ocean...
Many ecological populations can be interpreted as response surfaces; the spatial
patterns of the population vary in response to changes in the spatial patterns of
environmental explanatory variables. Collection of a probability sample from the
population provides unbiased estimates of the population parameters using design
based estimation. When information is...
GIScience (geographic information science) is a scholarly discipline that addresses
fundamental issues surrounding the use of a variety of digital technologies to handle
geographic information; namely, information about places, activities, and phenomena on
and near the surface of the Earth that are stored in maps or images. GIScience includes
the...