As part of the ecosystem approach to managing fisheries and other uses of marine ecosystems, there has been a growing call for the development of integrated assessment tools to support the provision of both tactical and strategic management advice. Of particular importance in this domain is the development of models...
This report is an economic and policy assessment of the biological effectiveness and economic efficiency of incentive mechanisms for private landowners to conserve U.S. biodiversity. Its focus is on rural lands that tend to be used for forestry, agriculture and residential purposes.
Ideally, we seek to develop perfectly integrated ecological-economic models, drawing on the best data, modeling and knowledge of each of the disciplines, into one coherent model to inform policy. The realities of achieving such are thwarted by data and model compatibility issues. For example, ecological data may be available on...
This study compares globally available integrated ecological-economic models with focus on use and implementation in scientific and advisory contexts. The Ecosystem based Approach to (Fisheries) Management (EAM) calls for an understanding and management of fisheries and other uses of the marine environment that explicitly take into account ecological, economic and...
Biologists have criticized traditional biomass models in fishery economics for being oversimplified. Biological stock assessment models are more sophisticated with regard to biological content, but rarely account for economic objectives. Recently, age-structured models of fish stocks have increasingly been used in fisheries economics, but applications have so far mainly been...
The paper is the first attempt to explore the ecological and economic impacts of genetic interaction between farmed and wild salmon over generations. An age- and stage-structured bioeconomic model is developed. The biological part of the model includes age-specific life history traits such as survival rate, fecundity, spawning success for...
This paper deals with the sustainable management of a renewable resource
based on individual and transferable quotas (ITQs) when agents differ in terms of
harvesting costs or catchability. In a dynamic bio-economic model, we determine
the conditions under which the manager of an ITQ system can achieve sustainability
objectives which...
Economic analysis of optimal ecosystem management in the presence
of a threshold has typically ignored the potential for induced behavioral responses. This
paper contributes to the literature on non-convex ecosystem management by considering
the implications of a particular behavioral response in a regional economy - that of amenity-led
growth -...
To achieve sustainable fisheries, ecosystem-based fisheries management
yields increasing attention. However, so far mainly single-species models
are used to develop management advice, not accounting for species
interaction. In particular many traditional fisheries economic models have
been criticized by biologists, especially if results were gained by rather
simple biomass models. Therefore,...
The rapid pace of climate change and increased human disturbance of ecosystems in the Arctic is bringing urgency to concern over non-native species introductions and their potential threats to the marine environment and its economic productivity, where before environmental conditions served as a barrier to their establishment. The same characteristics...
In 1994, with the approval of the Northwest Forest Plan, the livelihood of individuals in the surrounding communities of the Siuslaw National Forest and Siuslaw Watershed were further impacted by already diminished traditional timber practices. In 2003, the United States Forest Service developed an innovative program, stewardship contracting, aimed at...
A concern for the consequences of bycatch and discards in fisheries has led to the implementation of
new policies and fisheries management plans aimed at their reduction in many fisheries around the
world. Such plans have been developed for the Australian Commonwealth fisheries (the most recent
bycatch action plan extends...
Land-use change significantly contributes to biodiversity loss, invasive species spread, changes in biogeochemical cycles, and the loss of ecosystem services. Planning for a sustainable future requires a thorough understanding of expected land use at the fine spatial scales relevant for modeling many ecological processes and at dimensions appropriate for regional...
A major challenge for biodiversity conservation is to mitigate the effects of future environmental change, such as land use, in important areas for biodiversity conservation. In the United States, recent conservation efforts by The Nature Conservancy and partners have identified and mapped the nation's Areas of Biodiversity Significance (ABS), representing...
We present the outlines of an integrated economic-ecological framework
designed to help assess the implementation of the ecosystem-based
management (EBM) of fisheries in New England. We develop the
framework by linking a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of a
coastal economy to a bottom-up model of a marine food web...
The implementation of US federal forest restoration programs on national forests is a complex process that requires balancing diverse socioecological goals with project economics. Despite both the large geographic scope and substantial investments in restoration projects, a quantitative decision support framework to locate optimal project areas and examine tradeoffs among...
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...
Ecosystem based fishery management has moved beyond rhetorical statements calling for a more holistic approach to resource management, to implementing decisions on resource use that are compatible with goals of maintaining ecosystem health and resilience. Coupled economic-ecological models are a primary tool for informing these decisions. Recognizing the importance of...
Against the backdrop of growing concern about dead zones, rare and endangered sea mammals, depletion of Oregon’s once‐abundant fish stocks, acidification threatening coastal molluscs, and proposals for marine reserves along Oregon’s coastline, a multidisciplinary group of scientists was called together in 2008 to discuss what is known about Oregon’s coastal...
KEYWORDS: Cindy Glick, Eric White, Institude for Working Forest Landscapes, Emily Jane Davis, Thomas Maness, Forest service, Sweet Home Ranger District
When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of the traditional remote-sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring in natural systems, omitting many more...
Globally, mangrove forests represents only 0.7% of world's tropical forested area but are highly threatened due to susceptibility to climate change, sea level rise, and increasing pressures from human population growth in coastal regions. Our study was carried out in the Bhitarkanika Conservation Area (BCA), the second-largest mangrove area in...
Forest-fire policy of U.S. federal agencies has evolved from the use of small
patrols in newly created National Parks to diverse policy initiatives and institutional arrangements
that affect millions of hectares of forests. Even with large expenditures and
substantial infrastructure dedicated to fire suppression, the annual area burned by wildfire...
Bioethanol produced from the lignocellulosic feedstock is a potential alternative to fossil fuels in transportation sector and can help in reducing environmental burdens. Straw produced from perennial ryegrass (PR) and wheat is a non-food, cellulosic biomass resource available in abundance in the Pacific Northwest U.S. The aim of this study...
Species invasions have a range of negative effects on recipient ecosystems, and many occur at a scale and magnitude that preclude complete eradication. When complete extirpation is unlikely with available management resources, an effective strategy may be to suppress invasive populations below levels predicted to cause undesirable ecological change. We...
Complex systems science provides a transdisciplinary framework to study systems characterized by (1) heterogeneity, (2) hierarchy, (3) self‐organization, (4) openness, (5) adaptation, (6) memory, (7) non‐linearity, and (8) uncertainty. Complex systems thinking has inspired both theory and applied strategies for improving ecosystem resilience and adaptability, but applications in forest ecology...
At global and regional scales, tree mortality rates are positively correlated with forest net primary productivity (NPP). Yet causes of the correlation are unknown, in spite of potentially profound implications for our understanding of environmental controls of forest structure and dynamics and, more generally, our understanding of broad-scale environmental controls...
Coastlines have traditionally been engineered to maintain structural stability and to protect property from storm-related damage, but their ability to endure will be challenged over the next century. The use of vegetation to reduce erosion on ocean-facing mainland and barrier island shorelines – including the sand dunes and beaches on...
Pathogen invasions pose a growing threat to ecosystem stability and public health. Guidelines for the timing and spatial extent of control measures for pathogen invasions are currently limited, however. We conducted a field experiment using wheat (Triticum aestivum) stripe rust, caused by the wind-dispersed fungus Puccinia striiformis, to study the...
A topic of recurring interest in ecological research is the degree to which
vegetation structure influences the distribution and abundance of species. Here we test the
applicability of remote sensing, particularly novel use of waveform lidar measurements, for
quantifying the habitat heterogeneity of a contiguous northern hardwoods forest in the...
Managing multiple ecosystem services (ESs) across landscapes presents a central challenge for ecosystem-based management, because services often exhibit spatiotemporal variation and weak associations with co-occurring ESs. Further focus on the mechanistic relationships among ESs and their underlying biophysical processes provides greater insight into the causes of variation and covariation among...
Rangelands are significant providers of ecosystem services in agroecosystems world‐wide. Yet few studies have investigated how different intensities of livestock grazing impact one important provider of these ecosystem services—native bees. We conducted the first large‐scale manipulative study on the effect of a gradient of livestock grazing intensities on native bees...
dependence and regulation of relatively large local populations? If so, what are the causative mechanisms and their implications? We conducted an eight-year multigeneration study of population dynamics of bicolor damselfish (Stegastes partitus) inhabiting four large coral reefs in the Bahamas. After a four-year baseline period, it was clear that two...
Resilience-based management in rangelands implies maintaining desirable ecological states and avoiding thresholds to less desirable ones; however, the efficacy of resilience-based management depends upon several driving forces. These forces include management by those who depend upon rangelands for their livelihoods, the current state of ecological health of rangelands, and changing...
Trade in live plants has been recognized worldwide as an important invasion pathway for non-native plant pests. Such pests can have severe economic and ecological consequences. Nearly 70% of damaging forest insects and pathogens established in the US between 1860 and 2006 most likely entered on imported live plants. The...
Fossil fuels have been the main source of energy for a long period but due to growing concerns over climate change, oil depletion and energy security, the development of renewable sources of energy such as biofuels have been flourishing over the past few decades. Despite the fact that biofuels are...
Poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) is a renewable, biodegradable biopolymer that has
shown great promise to offset the use of hydrocarbon-derived plastics. The genes
encoding the bacterial PHB production pathway have been engineered into several
higher order plant species providing an opportunity to produce PHB as a
co-product on an industrial, agricultural scale....
This collection houses the proceedings of the 20th biennial conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade (IIFET), entitled Managing a Changing Environment. The conference took place at Auditorio Mar de Vigo in Vigo, Galicia, Spain, from 18-22 July 2022. Conference organizers were M. Dolores Garza-Gil (University of...
Ecosystem services play a crucial role in sustaining human well-being and economic viability. People benefit substantially from the delivery of ecosystem services, for which substitutes usually are costly or unavailable. Climate change will substantially alter or eliminate certain ecosystem services in the future. To better understand the consequences of climate...
Ethanol production from lignocellulosic feedstock has been under intense scrutiny as a transportation fuel due to its potential to address concerns of increasing energy consumption, limited fossil energy resources, climate changes due to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, and especially use of non-food biomaterials, which address the biggest limitation...
Background, aim and scope: The aim of this study was to perform a well-to-pump life cycle assessment (LCA) to investigate the overall net energy balance and environmental impact of bioethanol production using Tall Fescue grass straw as feedstock. The energy requirements and green house gas (GHG) emissions were compared to...
Rapid hydropower development is occurring in China's Yunnan province in response to increasing clean energy demands, exposing potential vulnerabilities of the area's ecosystems, communities, and geopolitical systems. Here, we present original data on the cultures, economics, hydro-politics, and environments of the Nu River basin, based on household surveys, analysis of...
Most current models analyzing technology adoption are based on a function that assumes farmers make decisions upon utility maximization but ignores cultural or social factors. The traditional production systems of the Mekong Delta were based on floating rice varieties and fish harvested both from rivers and rice fields. Since 1980...
The role of evapotranspiration (ET) in the global, continental, regional, and local water cycles is reviewed. Elevated atmospheric CO₂, air temperature, vapor pressure deficit (D), turbulent transport, radiative transfer, and reduced soil moisture all impact biotic and abiotic processes controlling ET that must be extrapolated to large scales. Suggesting a...
Support for low-carbon energy and opposition to new large dams encourages global development of small hydropower facilities. This support is manifested in national and international energy and development policies designed to incentivize growth in the small hydropower sector while curtailing large dam construction. However, the preference of small to large...
Although science is widely accepted as a fundamental source of information underlying decisions about forest management and conservation, considerably less attention has been paid to the inevitable role that normative values and beliefs play in such decisions. This thesis highlights the normative dimensions of "ecological forestry," a strategy of forest...