Many production activities typically produce undesirable outputs, e.g., the production of the pollutant sulfur dioxide in the generation of electricity. Traditional economic metrics may overstate the efficiency and productivity of these production activities by failing to account for the undesirable outputs. These omissions can lead to conclusions that are biased against resource conservation and protection. Many fisheries capture their target species concomitantly with undesirable outputs such as bycatch of juvenile fish, marine mammals, sea birds, and sea turtles. One such fishery is the California-Oregon (CA/OR) drift gillnet fishery (DGNF), which incidentally takes protected species, such as sea turtles and marine mammals while harvesting swordfish and thresher shark. Beginning in August of 2001, regulatory measures to reduce the take of endangered species (e.g., leatherback sea turtles) have required the annual closure of an area located between Point Conception and 45?? N. latitude, for the time period August 15 to November 15. This regulatory closure acts as a natural experiment for assessing the impact of the time-area closure on the productivity of the CA/OR DGNF. The three primary purposes of this research were to measure the impact of the 2001 time-area closure on the productivity of the CA/OR DGNF, and to estimate the opportunity cost or shadow price of undesirable outputs. These shadow prices provide lower bound estimates of the social costs of conservation regulations intended to protect endangered leatherback sea turtles and other bycatch species. An alternative method which models the joint production of both desirable and undesirable outputs, the directional output distance function approach, was used to estimate the efficiency and productivity of drift gillnet fishing trips, thus crediting trips with reductions in undesirable harvest and increases in desirable outputs for the time period 1996-2008. By incorporating undesirable harvest into the production process, a more appropriate measure of total factor productivity was calculated than what is provided by traditional productivity measures. The new productivity measure can be used to develop more effective policies designed to maintain or improve a fishery's economic performance. The results indicate that efficiency and productivity measures which ignore undesirable outputs substantially misinterpret the economic performance of economic trips. The model that incorporates undesirable outputs indicates that productivity per trip has been growing by 788 pounds of swordfish over the research period relative to the base year. This is considerably lower than the average growth of 964 pounds when undesirable outputs are ignored and 878 pounds when undesirable outputs are allowed to expand. However, post-closure averages suggest that conventional estimates understate the economic performance of the observed trips. Post-closure productivity growth resulted in an increase of 334 pounds of swordfish harvest when adjusted for undesirable outputs. Average trip shadow prices (per animal captured) revealed a conservation opportunity cost for the reduction of undesirable outputs of &2,500 for marketable discards, &6,600 for unmarketable discards, &28,800 for sea turtles, and &9,800 for marine mammals in forgone composite swordfish and thresher shark revenue.

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Bee pollinators can thrive in highly urbanized environments if their preferred floral resources and habitat types are available. Enhanced pollinator habitats are being created globally, with a large local effort in Portland, Oregon. This project determined if we were providing the most preferred floral resources at enhanced pollinator sites for bees, if floral resources were available throughout the season, and if differences in dietary preferences between native and honey bees would allow for the identification of "native bee floral resources" in South East Portland. Bee pollinators were monitored from June to August at three enhanced pollinator sites in South East Portland, Oregon. A total of 566 individual bees were observed, tiny dark bees and bumblebees composed the large majority of the urban bee composition. Vegetation metrics and bee presence were correlated using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model and significant variables that predicted bee presence included Solidago canadenisis (p-value 0.0024), density of floral resources (p-value

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The primary aim of the research conducted for this thesis was to develop a predictive model of information systems success for a publicly-available, web-based application that provides information to users on both the value of carbon credits that result from sequestration of carbon in a forest as well as potential earnings from supply of saleable timber. The application, also developed as part of this research, is called the CO2 Calculator. In addition attitudes of respondents to climate change and carbon sequestration were also gauged to ascertain their knowledge of key environmental issues relevant to the system.The model used as the foundation for the research is the DeLone and McLean (1992, 2002, 2003) model of information systems success. This model was adapted to measure information systems success for the CO2 Calculator which is a publicly available, web-based application rather than a proprietary, task-specific, organizationally focused application as measured in the prior research.Data was collected via a survey dispatched by email to users who accessed the CO2 Calculator. The survey instrument used builds on the existing work of Torkzadeh and Doll (1988, 1999), Seddon and Kiew (1994) and Torkzadeh et al. (2005). All of these researchers used variations of the End User Survey (EUS) to collect data on end users’ perceptions of the success of various applications, all of which were internal, organisationally-focussed, task specific, proprietary systems. This meant the survey items used for the current research were adapted to measure users’ attitudes to a publicly-available, web-based application that had no task-specific roles in an organisation.Analysis of the data proceeded in two distinct phases. The first phase was the examination and presentation of descriptive information about the demographic characteristics of the sample and the users’ attitudes to climate change, carbon sequestration and the overall success of the CO2 Calculator. The descriptive data indicated the respondents are a technologically literate group who have concerns related to environmental management and the use of land for sustainable practices. It also showed that the users were extremely satisfied with the CO2 Calculator.In the second phase Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used to examine the constructs underlying the data and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to examine the relationships among the constructs. Both the EFA and SEM resulted in structures and relationships that differed from the hypothesised outcomes and revealed a set of constructs and relationships that were clearly associated with the success of a publicly-available, web based application with different theoretical associations than those found by previous researchers examining organisationally-focussed, proprietary applications.Regression analyses were also conducted to check the relationships among constructs that were omitted from the final structural model, but were on the hypothesised model. Support for their inclusion in further studies was found as the analysis identified that the scales used to measure these constructs were significant predictors of the outcome variables although not when networked with those constructs that were on the final measurement model.Notwithstanding the limitations of the research, it has resulted in the identification of a predictive model of information success for web-based, publicly available, nonorganisationally focused systems.