Spatiotemporal planning involves making choices at multiple locations in space over some planning horizon to maximize
utility and satisfy various constraints. In Forest Ecosystem Management, the problem is to choose actions for thousands of locations
each year including harvesting, treating trees for fire or pests, or doing nothing. The utility...
This dissertation reviews the literature on the specialty area of dolphin assisted therapy (DAT), a subfield of animal assisted therapy (AAT). To date the literature on the effectiveness of DAT has been mixed although a majority of it is positive. The study was conducted with 40 parents whose children were...
In a simulator-defined MDP, the Markovian dynamics and rewards are provided in the form of a simulator from which samples can be drawn. This paper studies MDP planning algorithms that attempt to minimize the number of simulator calls before terminating and outputting a policy that is approximately optimal with high...
Where a legacy of aggressive wildland fire suppression has left forests in need of fuel reduction, allowing
wildland fire to burn may provide fuel treatment benefits, thereby reducing suppression costs from subsequent fires. The
least-cost-plus-net-value-change model of wildland fire economics includes benefits of wildfire in a framework for
evaluating suppression...
Diet variation among individuals within populations is widespread. Often diet differences among individuals are attributable to obvious differences among individuals such as age, sex, or morphology. However, growing evidence suggests that individual diet variation is also common among seemingly identical individuals within populations. This phenomenon has been termed individual diet...
During the 2017 greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) breeding season, 1,580 aerial and ground lek surveys were conducted at 674 individual lek sites comprising 429 lek complexes. Surveys were conducted at 58.0% of known lek sites in the state. Survey effort during 2017 declined -17.1%, -12.2%, and 14.5% from 2016 levels,...
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) were once found in most grassland and
sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) habitats east of the Cascades in Oregon. European settlement and
conversion of sagebrush steppe into agricultural production led to extirpation of the species in the
Columbia Basin by the early part of the 1900s, but sagebrush...
In Oregon, property tax revolts and school equalization measures have led to increasingly unstable and more non-discretionary public funding for schools. As a result, public schools are turning to private donations to provide both basic and supplemental educational opportunities. Some schools and districts are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars,...
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Mark E. Edwards
In Oregon, property tax revolts and school equalization measures have