Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Glenn H. Doran, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Anthropology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 73 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2007. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Sept. 26, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xx, 613 p. : ill., maps. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 598-613).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-71).

This thesis explores topics in Agricultural Economics and is composed of five papers. In the first paper (Chapter 2), a latent-class stochastic frontier model is used to estimate efficiency scores of farmers in Ethiopia. Compared to conventional models, which assume a unique frontier, much lower inefficiencies are found, suggesting that part of the inefficiencies uncovered in the literature could be an artefact of the methods used. The second paper (Chapter 3) revisits the link between cereal diversity and productivity using a panel dataset in Ethiopia. The results suggest that the positive effect between cereal diversity and productivity becomes much smaller when households who produce teff (a low-productivity and high-value crop) are excluded from the sample, hinting at the possibility that results could be driven by yield differentials between cereals, rather than diversity. The third paper (Chapter 4) estimates the labour impacts of the adoption of Soil and Water Conservation technologies (SWC) in Ethiopia. The results suggest that adopting SWC technologies leads to an increase in adult and child labour. Understanding the labour impacts is important in itself, but it also raises concerns about using impact evaluation methods that require no change in inputs as an identifying assumption of impacts. Paper 4 (Chapter 5), assesses the pertinence of a drought index that has recently been proposed in the literature by Yu and Babcock (2010) and argues that it defines drought too narrowly. An extension to this index is proposed and we show, using a dataset of Indian districts, that the original index is likely to underestimate the impacts of drought. In Paper 5 (Chapter 6), we identify data-driven ranges of rainfall for which the marginal effects of a rainfall-temperature index (RTI) are different and then we discuss how the impacts of drought have changed over the 1966-2009 period in India. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes.

For the past three decades, biologists and geographers have increasingly incorporated geographical information systems to inventory and analyze spatially organized data. The proliferation of computational tools and models for visualizing, processing, and quantifying landscape patterns has continued sometimes without thorough scrutiny and scientific understanding of their benefits and limitations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the structure and accuracy of the ecological modeling program Land Change Modeler for ArcGIS (LCM) and its analytical methods. A case study rich in land use change at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge was used to focus on the program's ability to utilize imagery at multiple levels of spatial resolution and to quantify landscape change. The case study evaluated the LCM module on three primary criteria 1) inputs and outputs, 2) the impacts of scale and resolution in terms of proposed analytical methods, and 3) program structure, simplicity, flexibility, and function definitions. The study revealed that the module based structure of LCM demands specific inputs which allow for the assessment of landscape change, habitat, and biodiversity. But, the program is difficult to navigate and requires prior knowledge of analytical methods. The study also showed that the appropriate utilization of ecological computational programs should be based upon fundamental concepts of landscape ecology, the intended use of the outputs, and the prior knowledge of the user.

As a result of the cumulative interaction of several forces the demand pressures on outdoor recreation space and facilities in North America are increasing rapidly. The forces at work are those of population growth and urbanization, rising levels of per-capita income, leisure and mobility, the use of space-consuming recreational equipment, and the rise of the tourist-recreation industry. The supply, in terms of outdoor space and amenities, with the range of requisite site facilities, is limited, and the necessity of careful planning for recreational land use becomes increasingly apparent. There are conflicts between public and private interests, between various adjacent or simultaneous uses of land for recreation, between the agencies which provide the facilities through which recreation land is used, and between recreation and non-recreation land uses. On the assumption that the forces making for these conflicting pressures will continue, the hypothesis is proposed, that regional planning should provide an optimum balance between public, private-commercial, private-collective and private-individual types of recreation site development. This basically normative approach makes necessary a descriptive survey and evaluation of the four types of agency and their respective effects on the physical, economic, legal-administrative and social background of the region in which they occur. It also requires a consideration of the public interest as a norm within which the goals of outdoor-recreation planning may be established, and an analysis of the optimizing processes which are or might be the methological basis of planning. Two basic approaches to the problem of defining the public interest are exposed: one seeking to define it substantively as a particular state of affairs; the other seeking procedural or operational conditions which will generate it. In the latter case the processes of decision-making are of prior importance in leading toward the public interest, a concept which is itself left undefined in terms of concrete value content. It appears that the conflict-resolving process must be a process of balancing or harmonizing a wide range of values, including those of initiative in decision-making as well as those of concrete results. This balancing of values is called optimizing, since no single value must be maximized at the expense of others when each has a valid claim. The survey and analysis indicate that each of the four agencies for outdoor recreation site development In North America has a valid role to play in providing recreation and other benefits, given planning direction. The public interest in regional land-use planning, therefore, lies in optimizing recreation benefits, which in turn requires an optimum balance between public, private-commercial, private-collective and private individual types of site development. The hypothesis, insofar as it implies that planning can optimize recreation land-use on the regional scale, is not valid, since, although the region seems, prima facie, to be the appropriate unit in scale, there are many publics, and many interests in outdoor recreation which transcend regional limits. A true optimum, therefore, even within a region, is more likely to be achieved by national and even international planning of recreation resources. This limited investigation could be extended by further theoretical analysis and by field research, particularly in the form of attitude and other surveys of the impact of new recreation development on local communities. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

No abstract provided. / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)