This paper explores two potential land use planning strategies that can be used to preserve and enhance the economic viability of agricultural operations surrounded by suburban development in Santa Barbara County’s Eastern Goleta Valley: buffers between agriculture and other land uses, and agritourism. In the case of buffers, academic literature is examined to determine how effective buffers are at various tasks (filtering runoff, mitigating dust and wind, providing habitat, etc.) and how to construct buffers to maximize their effectiveness. Land use plans and codes from several California jurisdictions are studied to see how buffers are put to use. Academic literature is then reviewed to discover the benefits and potential drawbacks of agritourism to agricultural operations and the larger area. The zoning codes from the top five agritourism counties in California are evaluated to see how effective they are at facilitating five common agritourism uses; these best practices are then compared to the current zoning in Santa Barbara County. This paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of the literature and case studies to Eastern Goleta Valley, and proposes a new zoning designation and other policies to help maintain the urban agriculture operations. This new zoning designation includes a 30-foot minimum width for buffers and a three-tier categorization of land uses capable of promoting agritourism.

Subsistence maize production has long been a dominant economic activity of households in Santiago Apóstol, a Zapotec community in the Central Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. A baseline study from 1973 documents a regionally pervasive form of household level agriculture whereby cultivators prioritize land for subsistence maize above commercial crops. Since then, much has transformed the face of rural Mexico, including migration to the United States. Migration accelerated beginning in the 1970s as a response to government disinvestment in maize, but it may also be a new force of cultural and economic change impacting agriculture. The question arises, has migration modified longstanding subsistence agricultural practices centered on local varieties of rainfed maize? If not, what might explain the continuities and changes in agricultural practice observed? Ethnographic land use and maize consumption surveys among 19 migrant headed households conducted in Santiago Apóstol in the summer and winter of 2012 indicate that mean production of maize remains equivalent to that documented in the late 1960s, suggesting that migration has not engendered a generalized shift to commercial crops. Potential explanations for the persistent use of rainfed, local maize among migrant headed households are drawn from a mixed methods methodology involving triangulated analyses of household economic data, land tenure arrangements, perceptions of environmental change, participant observation, and archival research. Triangulated analyses allow speculation on linked human environmental changes in the landscape that may have reinforced use of a traditional, rainfed grain crop.

Brazil has an active agrarian reform policy program, publicly organized by the federal government and publicly administered at the state level by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform. The objective of the agrarian reform policy program is to retitle unproductive and underproductive rural lands to increase agricultural production and land use. Previous agrarian reform researchers have examined quantities of land redistributed, rural technology developments, and the impact of social movements on land redistribution, but a knowledge gap remains regarding the correlation of agricultural production yields in rural municipalities before and after policy program participation. The State of Ceará has undertaken continuous land redistribution efforts between 1975 and 2006. For this longitudinal study, an agricultural production yield t-test analysis was conducted for the Brazilian State of Ceará with the marked time-series data collection for 1990, 1996, 2000, and 2006. The research and evaluation of the agrarian reform policy program used publicly available, secondary data from the Government of Brazil's Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform. The correlated analysis was organized by group: municipalities with a high-rate of agrarian reform participation and municipalities with a no-rate level of agrarian reform participation. By marking the point of program participation at 1996, the time-series t test identified marked agricultural production increases as correlated to agrarian reform policy program participation. The results can be used to justify agrarian reform programs, to promote further rural infrastructure development, and to support poverty alleviation efforts.

Bold

This research developed an ArcGIS Python model that extracts polygons from aerial imagery and assigns each polygon a vegetation type based on a modified set of landcover classes from the Southwest Regional Gap Analysis Project. The model showed an ability to generate polygons that accurately represent vegetation community boundaries across a large landscape. The model is for use by the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands to assist in the preparation of forest management plans. The model was judged useful because it was easy to use, it met a designated 50% threshold of useable polygons, and it met a designated 50% threshold of vegetation class assignment accuracy.

Nous étudions les liens entre commerce international et soutenabilité. D’un point de vue théorique, la soutenabilitéest l’application de la théorie utilitariste à la théorie du capital. La soutenabilité se définit par unegestion équitable des moyens du développement. Il s’agit de préserver un certain niveau de consommation etde richesse tout en développant l’équité inter- et intragénérationnelle sous la contrainte du niveau socialementdéfini de substituabilité en valeur monétire des composants de la richesse. Les gains à l’échange issus du commerceinternational doivent être épargnés et réinvestis dans la mesure où ils sont le fruit d’une réallocationdes ressources au sein du pays considéré. La nature du commerce international a également un impact sur lessentiers de développement. La présence de rendements d’échelle croissants dans la division internationale desprocessus productifs a également un impact sur la soutenabilité. Nous montrons la façon dont les incitationsvenant du commerce international ont un impact joint sur la gestion des dotations dans les pays riches enressources naturelles. Un commerce inter-industries dans les secteurs des biens intensifs en ressources naturellesest un signe probable d’un sentier de développement insoutenable. Nous proposons d’étudier les pays issus del’Union Soviétique pour mieux comprendre les interactions entre institutions et soutenabilité. l’Epargne NetteAjustée (ENA) en Russie évolue de concert avec celle des pays voisins, sans lien avec celle d’autre pays ayantune même dotation en ressources naturelles. Nous préconisons d’utiliser des études contrefactuelles pour évaluerles trajectoires de développement dans un contexte d’uncertitude sur les niveaux réels de richesse globale.L’ensemble de ces éléments nous conduit à revisiter les logiques d’intégration économique dans une optique desoutenabilité. / We endeavour to explore the many ways by which international trade has an impact on sustainability.From a theoretical perspective, sustainability is the application of the utilitarian theory of value on capitaltheory, used to define the interactions between human-being and their environment. We show how sustainabilitycan be understood as sound and equitable management of the means of development, preserving consumptionand wealth over time while fostering intragenerational and intergenerational equity and controlling for moneyvaluesubstitutability. We use Adjusted Net Savings (ANS) to assess how opening economies to trade altersdevelopment paths. We then show how international trade should lead to additional savings, as gains fromtrade resulting from resources reallocation should be reinvested and not consumed. We explore how the natureof trade impacts development paths, showing how increasing returns to scale in the international division of theproduction processes changes factor prices. This should lead to more gains from trade saved and reinvested.We investigate how institutions and trade incentives interact in hindering sustainable management of naturalcapital in resource abundant countries. We show how inter-industry trade in natural resources intensive goodsmight be a sign for unsustainable development paths. To better understand interactions between institutionsand sustainability, we suggest the dislocation of the Soviet Union as a natural experiment. We show how theevolution of ANS in the Russian Federation is closely correlated with the neighbouring countries, regardless ofresources abundance. Counterfactual studies should be used to monitor sustainable development in the wakeof uncertainty and scarce data on comprehensive wealth depreciation. Those elements lead us to conclude onthe necessity to reconsider the rationale for economic integration on sustainability lines.

Intellectual property, particularly patents, plays a major role in innovation and discovery in biotechnology. Likewise, since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1981, patents have become an increasingly important factor in U.S. university-driven basic research, especially in the life sciences where patented technologies have transformed agriculture. Specifically, this paper looks at the potential impacts of these trends on university driven research, the university researcher, the pharmaceutical industry, and the farm sector with an emphasis on recent and pending court cases and legislation. This paper examines policy and adoptions issues in biotechnology and biomedicine in depth and touches on important developments in the tech sectors as a back drop for pending legislation and recent court rulings. How policy is adopted, implemented and interpreted have profound impacts on food production, medical ethics, ecology, U.S. and international farm and innovation sectors and the competiveness of the U.S. in the global economy

The Atlantic Forest of south-eastern Brazil is a hot-spot for biodiversity and should be conserved. It is also at the center of the largest municipalities in Brazil and therefore has a severely fragmented landscape. Iracambi, a working farm near the Serra do Brigadeiro state park in Minas Gerais, is working for conservation in an area of intense agricultural production and expanding forestry industry. Most households in this rural area have some amount of eucalyptus on their property and consequently the director of Iracambi is developing the preliminary foundation for a forest corridor program comprised of primarily eucalyptus with the goal of integrating native species whenever possible. In this research, an exploratory case study was conducted with the purpose of determining if an integrated forest corridor should be considered as a viable option for Iracambi in the greater Serra do Brigadeiro region (near the communities of Araponga, Ervália, Fervadouro, Miradouro, Pedra Bonita, and Sericita). The majority of the survey participants revealed interest in the proposed forest corridor program and many expressed further interest if this would help them achieve compliance with the environmental law requiring a Legal Reserve Area (ARL) on private property. There is a need and a desire for programs that would subsidize ARL adherence in this area, since many studies recognize that adherence levels are at approximately ten percent nationally. Barriers to implementation, however, include cultural barriers that would primarily require acceptance with influential community members, knowledge and cost barriers associated with proper stand management, and current economic circumstances which lack a market for sustainably produced, higher quality eucalyptus timber. Additionally, policy barriers, which do not provide sufficient incentives to comply with environmental laws, further impede implementation of an integrated forest corridor program in this area. If these key barriers to implementation could be addressed, an integrated forest corridor program could prove as a viable option for Iracambi and this area and therefore, this thesis offers some recommendations for the successful implementation of this proposed program.

For many of Latin America’s small farmers, a future in agriculture may be short lived. Due to increasing mechanization, land consolidation, and globalization, the demand for agricultural labor is declining, and small landowners are feeling the brunt of this change. Given this reality, the non-farm rural economy should become a much greater priority on the rural development agenda. Many non-farm positions demonstrate significant potential for poverty alleviation, but these jobs often present substantial barriers to entry. In order for smallholders to access these positions rather than low-skilled, low-productivity, and low-paying jobs, government involvement is essential. By helping small farmers build non-farm skills and knowledge, facilitating profitable land transactions, and fostering a business environment that supports rural job creation, governments can ensure that small farmers are not only able to transition to non-farm employment, but that they are able to do so in a way that maximizes the impact on overall rural welfare.

The topic of protected area management serves as the focal point of my thesis. The fundamental question I seek to answer is; what constitutes effective environmental management and how is it exemplified in the National Park Service (NPS)? How exactly does the NPS continually earn the trust and confidence of the American people when so many other government agencies are viewed in a negative light? How does the Channel Islands National Park, in particular, shape the economic and political framework in which it operates to achieve its goals? How does this agency effectively manage such a complex ecosystem spanning across five unique islands and the surrounding waters? More specifically, I examine how the NPS designs and implements strategies to simultaneously monitor a variety of endemic species, some of which are on the endangered species list, into feasible tasks and fundable projects. A wealth of information exists providing salient recommendations for improving endangered species recovery efforts, but this paper provides a detailed comparison of two contemporary recovery programs dealing with independent declines of the same species: the island fox. Finally, there is an overlapping mix of jurisdiction responsible for protecting the Channel Islands and I will also be examining the collaborative processes that take place among the multiple stakeholders such as the U.S. Navy, Catalina Island Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy. The primary purpose of this thesis is to assess the relationships the NPS develops with other agencies in order to fulfill its mission within the context of the Channel Islands.