Balancing the goals of economic development and sustaining ecosystem services remains a challenge for policymakers, particularly in the marine environment where ecosystem dynamics and human interactions are both complex and poorly understood. Implementing environmental management policies, such as environmental restoration, is a common response by policymakers where economic and environmental...
Land managers, scientists, and the interested public are confronted with uncertainty about the impacts of salvage logging on soil productivity. In recent years, stand-replacing wildfires in the western United States have increased in frequency, prompting the need to evaluate the effect of post-fire treatments on forest ecosystem recovery. This study...
Interactions between various uses of marine systems and between marine and terrestrially-based activities are quite well documented, and, in some cases, the negative impact of competing activities on the value of wild and farmed fisheries has also been evaluated. While such effects are usually reflected in a decline in the...
Overcapacity remains a major issue in world fisheries. The specific conditions that give rise to overcapacity in the pure open access fishery remain unclear, however the non‑malleability of capital is widely regarded as a necessary condition for the accumulation of excess harvesting capacity. In the process of fisheries collapse known...
Depleted fish stocks and habitat degradation associated with human activity, particularly fishing, are both the subject of increasing concern and research. Harvest control rules and no-take marine reserves are two management approaches regularly advocated as effective means of restoring depleted fish stocks and preventing fishery collapse. We incorporate these two...
The spatial distribution and abundance patterns of benthic infauna result from interactions with a host of environmental variables including sediment characteristics (percent silt-clay, grain size, total organic carbon), depth, temperature, and dissolved oxygen. This thesis focuses on the association of bivalve assemblages and species with potentially influential environmental variables along...
The depletion of important fish stocks and the degradation of marine ecosystems are common problems worldwide. Two approaches that have been widely used to restore depleted fish stocks are the implementation of harvest control rules and the establishment of marine reserve networks. Harvest control rules, underpinned by the monitoring and...
In the current global economy, higher education is critical for gaining and keeping living-wage jobs. The need for a college-educated labor force has increased interest among youth in pursuing higher education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Despite these demands, the United States has struggled to effectively increase college completion...
With the development of the ecosystem approach to f
isheries (EAF), fisheries management is
increasingly required to deal with multiple, often
conflicting objectives. In this context, the
stochastic co-viability approach has been proposed
as a useful modeling framework as it allows
for the combined representation of complex fisherie
s dynamics,...
Postfire logging recoups the economic value of timber killed by wildfire, but whether such forest management activity supports or impedes forest recovery in stands differing in structure from historic conditions remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of mechanical logging after wildfire on soil bacterial...