The data intensive nature of precision farming necessitates the use of different technologies to collect, transmit, manipulate, and apply information. Understanding the economic factors associated with decisions regarding technology adoption and abandonment is essential to the continued growth and feasibility of precision farming. The development of precision agricultural technologies, as well as educational and promotional efforts concerning precision farming, can benefit from an understanding of the factors influencing adoption and abandonment of precision agricultural technology. The first part of the study examined farm and farmer characteristics influencing the adoption and subsequent abandonment of precision soil sampling in cotton production. The second part of the study analyzed farm and farmer characteristics influencing adoption of personal digital assistants (PDA) and other handheld computers with global positioning systems (GPS) capabilities in cotton production. Farm and farmer characteristics affecting adoption and abandonment of precision soil sampling in cotton production were examined first using univariate analysis of farm and farm characteristics of adopters and non-adopters and second using probit analysis. Younger, more educated farmers who had positive perceptions about the future of precision agriculture, and who operated larger farms were more likely to adopt precision soil sampling. Computer use in farm management and placing a greater percentage of cropped acres in crops other than cotton also positively influenced adoption. Younger farmers who used variable-rate application of inputs were less likely to abandon precision soil sampling. Acreage and the percentage of cropped acres in crops other than cotton positively influenced abandonment. Results indicate that younger farmers who perceive that Extension services were useful in making precision farming decisions have a higher probability of adopting a PDA or handheld GPS device. The presence of greater yield variability and the use of remotely sensed crop images, grid soil sampling, plant mapping, and variable-rate application of certain inputs also increase the probability of adoption. Percentages of PDA/handheld GPS device use were highest for variable-rate application of fertilizer and lime, management zone identification, drainage management, and the application of growth regulator.

As rural areas struggle to adjust to the changing U.S. economy with increasing unemployment, falling wages, and constrained capital markets, economic developers look for strategies to promote economic expansion. Development strategies identifying and evaluating county comparative advantage may offer the promise of economic growth in rural areas. This thesis develops two models whereby county comparative advantage can be empirically identified and evaluated. The study first examines ethanol plant location determinants at the county level, in the contiguous forty-eight United States, the second identified industry clusters within Tennessee at the county level and estimated the extent to which these clusters contributed to growth in labor productivity. In the first study, the location of grain-based ethanol plants is determined by infrastructure, product and input markets, fiscal attributes of local communities, and state and federal incentives. Bivariate probit regression along with spatial clustering methods are used to analyze investment activity of ethanol plants at the county level for the contiguous 48 United States from 2000-2007. The ability of a county to supply feedstock, and the absence of previously established ethanol plants, dominated the site selection decision between 2000 and 2007. Other factors, such as access to railroads or navigable rivers, product markets, low worker wages, producer credit and excise tax incentives, and methyl tertiary-butyl ether bans gave some counties comparative advantage with respect to attracting grain-based ethanol plant investment. The second study identified industry clusters or economic linkages between purchasers and suppliers, at the county and regional level for 447 economic sectors in Tennessee. Information about value-added activities or innovative potential is possible by determining the sector composition of the value chains defining an industry cluster. The cluster analysis was extended to estimate the extent to which specific value chains contributed to economic growth between 2001 and 2006 across Tennessee’s 95 counties using an econometric model. County and regional comparative advantage was determined by testing whether the presence of a particular value chain in a given county increased labor productivity during this period.

The purpose of this study was to determine specific types of supervisory methods used in diverse academic subjects to fulfill personal and professional growth in student teachers and interns. The study sought to compare agriculture, science, math and English teacher educator characteristics and the extent to which the three levels of the Supervisory Options for Instructional Leaders (SOIL) Framework—structured, moderately structured, and relatively unstructured—were used. Surveys were collected from 196 student teacher and intern supervisors throughout the United States. The study revealed that demographic associations appeared to have no bearing on the type of supervisory methods used with the exception that rank of the supervisor had a low correlation with the SOIL Framework in supervisors of agricultural education student teachers and interns. Supervisors of student teachers and interns who taught English, science, and agricultural education were most likely to always use moderately structured levels of supervision. Supervisors of math instruction reported using moderately structured levels of supervision often as opposed to always. The relatively unstructured level of supervision was virtually never utilized by supervisors of any subject areas. Recommendations for further study were provided in this thesis. The SPSS version 12.0 for Windows was used to analyze data. Descriptive statistics included frequencies, percentages, means, modes, standard deviations, range, percents and frequencies. Analysis of data utilized Chi Squares, T-Tests, correlation coefficients, analysis of variance, and coefficients of stability. Statistical significance of relationships was established by the a priori .05 probability level.

The 2004 Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act, commonly referred to as the Tobacco Buyout Program, ended the federal tobacco program. This act ended price supports and quotas, and also ended reporting requirements. The tobacco industry is now faced with new challenges in tobacco production as they have scant information to base production decisions on. The 2006 Burley Tobacco Survey provides an initial outlook of future production, challenges, trends and expectations. The results from the survey were used to analyze future production decisions. An ordered logit model reveals that producers who received prices of $1.65/lb or more, have farms in excess of 250 acres, received less than 10 percent of total gross farm receipts from tobacco, are 34 years old or younger, or have a graduate or professional degree are more likely to continue burley tobacco production in 2007. Farmers with gross agricultural receipts of $9,999 or less, those who make higher amounts in terms of net household income, and those producers who are from North Carolina are less likely to continue production in 2007.

In this thesis, a model to analyze land use in a multi-county region of the Southeastern United States is presented. Farmer planting decisions are assumed to follow a non-stationary first order Markov decision process. The non-stationary transition probabilities are estimated as a function of the prior year‟s land usage and a set of exogenous variables using annual county level data from 1981 to 2005 using the maximum entropy method suggested by Golan et al. (1996). The transition probabilities are applied to each county‟s prior period crop production to estimate crop production in the current period. The model is graphically validated. A discussion is included on difficulties encountered in estimation of the model. Acreage elasticities are estimated and used to analyze the marginal effects of the explanatory variables on crop land use.

The purpose of this study is to examine burley tobacco growers decision making processes as they pertain to labor usage during the harvest of their crop and adoption rates of mechanical harvesting technology in order to create a laudable document that could be used by those who disseminate knowledge in agricultural communities. This study sought to compare current conventional harvesting methods to mechanical harvesting methods to determine efficiency and affordability of each of the two methods for the tobacco grower. This study incorporated both survey data and focus group data in order to develop the findings herein. Survey data were used to examine burley tobacco growing regions in order to effectively site focus groups and to collect descriptive statistics on burley tobacco growers. Focus groups were conducted in Kentucky and Tennessee, the two major burley tobacco producing states in the southeast. There were 41 growers who participated in the focus groups with burley acreages ranging from 9 – 350 acres and years experience of tobacco production ranging from 3 – 60 years. The study revealed overall that growers were very satisfied with their conventional labor practices. The growers were reluctant to invest in mechanical harvesting technology due to uncertainty about the future of the burley tobacco market, inefficiency of the machines, cost of the harvesters and the availability of migrant labor. Survey data that were collected directly correlate with focus group findings, and recommendations for further study are provided in this thesis.

Progress in early ecological restoration is a measure which has not been extensively studied in the relatively new body of literature surrounding this field of study. Early restoration is an extremely beneficial area of study due to the increasing number of degraded areas which require immediate attention in order to stabilize soil, or deter exotic species invasion. An early restoration effort was implemented and observed in Natchez Hills, an Environmentally Sensitive Policy Area in the Region of Waterloo from May 2006 to June 2007. Natchez Hills is a maple-beech dominated forest which has been severely degraded by mountain biking, and faces other pressures such as urbanization, fragmentation and invasive species encroachment. The experiment was designed so that different combinations of three understory plants could be tested for their effectiveness at progress in early restoration. The species selected for use in this study were Erythronium americanum Ker. (trout lily), Podophyllum peltatum L. (mayapple) and Caulophyllum thalictroides L. Michx. (blue cohosh). The experiment was designed across four blocks of the forest study site with varying degrees of degradation, with eight 1 m2 plots per block which contained one of the seven combinations of understory plants or the control treatment. In the spring of 2006, E. americanum and P. peltatum were planted at a density of 6 plants m-2, and C. thalictroides was transplanted into the plots at a density of 2 plants m-2. The transplants were monitored on a biweekly basis through the months of May to August in 2006. Invasive species in the plots were controlled by aboveground biomass clipping during the same period. In the spring of 2007, second season survivorship was measured by counting the number of plants which returned to the plots. Erythronium americanum returned at a rate of 92%, P. peltatum at a rate of 97% and C. thalictroides at a rate of 100%. The return rates were statistically analyzed using one-way ANOVA. Results showed no significant differences (p<0.05) between the seven experimental treatments. Additionally, return rates examining differences between the experimental blocks (block effect) were also not significantly different (p<0.05). These results indicate, respectively, that combinations do not perform significantly better than solitary plantings of any of the three species, and that these plants can be successfully planted into varying levels of degradation. During the 2007 field season, while measuring transplant return rates, some unexpected results were observed. These included asexual plants returning as sexual plants, bearing flowers and producing fruit (P. peltatum and C. thalictroides), and returning transplants spawning extra clonal individuals within the plots (P. peltatum). These occurrences added an extra layer of progress to the early restoration effort by increasing both reproductive potential and biomass cover within the experimental plots. Overall the restoration effort was deemed to be successful, based on the structural success obtained in this study. However, it should be noted that the field of restoration ecology still seeks a unified answer on what makes a restoration project successful, so determining that progress was achieved by structural means should be taken only within the context of this type of study. This study was helpful in informing the overlooked areas of understory restoration, early-stage restoration and the use of combinations. Though there remains a significant demand for more research in all of these areas, this study has served the purpose of identifying a usable protocol for real world restoration efforts. The three species used can be highly recommended for future restoration within their geographical range, into a range of degradation conditions, in any combination.

In Canada, anticipated climate changes including an increased frequency of hot temperature extremes and intense precipitation events, are projected to affect surface water and groundwater resources with respect to water quality and water quantity. At the watershed scale, examples of these effects include changes to water flows and water availability, runoff and evaporation patterns, and dissolved oxygen and phosphorus concentrations, with potentially negative implications. In Ontario, Conservation Authorities (CAs) play an important role in managing and protecting water resources at the watershed scale, through collaboration with the municipal and provincial governments, stakeholders and community members. The projected effects of climate change on water resources will be felt at the watershed scale and will have an impact on existing activities within CAs. Research suggests that current management practices may not be sufficient to adapt to climate change effects. Therefore, CAs should be involved in climate change adaptation. This research evaluated what capacity Ontario CAs currently have for climate change adaptation, through a case-study comparison of two CAs – the North Bay-Mattawa Conservation Authority (NBMCA) and Credit Valley Conservation (CVC). An evaluative framework with indicators of capacity in three environments – the institutional environment (i.e., presence and quality of institutional arrangements), the organizational environment (i.e., organizational resources and organizational dynamics) and the action environment (i.e., community and political support), was developed through a literature review. The evaluative framework was used to assess CA capacity for climate change adaptation through information obtained from open-ended, semi-structured key informant interviews with CA employees, a review of documentation and direct observation. The results of the evaluation revealed that the capacity for climate change adaptation varied considerably between the NBMCA and CVC, particularly in the organizational environment. CVC had strong capacity in terms of resources availability and had already begun to adapt to climate change in its watershed management activities. The NBMCA was challenged with respect to resources availability and had not yet begun to adapt to climate change. Overall, this research highlighted the importance of developing partnerships, communicating, and sharing resources and expertise with other organizations and the local community.

Resource management for a data center with multiple job classes is investigated in this thesis. We focus on strategies for allocating resources to an application mix such that the service level agreements (SLAs) of individual applications are met. A performance model with two interactive job classes is used to determine the smallest number of processor nodes required to meet the SLAs of both classes. For each class, the SLA is specified by the relationship: Prob(response time≤x)≥y. Two allocation strategies are considered: shared allocation (SA) and dedicated allocation (DA). For the case of FCFS scheduling, analytic results for response time distribution are used to develop a heuristic algorithm that determines the allocation strategy (SA or DA) that requires fewer processor nodes. The effectiveness of this algorithm is evaluated over a range of operating conditions. The performance of SA with non-FCFS scheduling is also investigated. Among the scheduling disciplines considered, a new discipline called probability dependent priority (PDP) is found to have the best performance in terms of requiring the smallest number of nodes. Furthermore, we extend our heuristic algorithm for FCFS to three job classes. The effectiveness of this extended algorithm is evaluated. As to priority scheduling, the performance advantage of PDP is also confirmed for the case of three job classes.

Studies in the fields of invasion and landscape ecology suggest that there is certainly a spatial component to the spread and establishment of exotic plant species. An understanding of how patch dynamics affects the dispersal process is necessary for effective management of invasive or problematic exotic plant species. However, studies that have specifically compared spatial attributes of natural areas with exotic plant species diversities (or abundances) have had disparities in their scale or methodology, and incongruent results. I sought to answer the question of whether landscape and patch variables (or soil texture) can predict the presence of exotic plant species in natural areas, using a case study of the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The objective of this study was to determine whether landscape and patch variables can be used (albeit most effectively with long-term monitoring) as part of a management plan and monitoring priority list for Kitchener and Waterloo’s urban natural areas. I collected vegetation and soil data at 98 edge and core sites in 5 natural areas, ranging in size from 16 – 146 ha. In total, 19 exotic and 39 native herbaceous species, and 11 exotic and 43 native tree and shrub species occurred in the 490 sampling plots at 98 sites. Using Usher’s (1988) index of invasion, the parks cumulatively had 33% invasion of their herbaceous layer and 20% invasion of their shrub/tree layer. I conducted Kruskal-Wallis tests of the non-parametric data (for both species diversities and abundances) and results showed that native herbaceous, tree and shrub species richness was significantly higher than exotic species at core and edge sites at 4 of the 5 parks (Doon had significantly higher numbers of exotic species than native species at its edge sites). No significant relationship was found between soil texture and the presence of exotic herbaceous plants, tree or shrubs at any of the parks. Additionally, no significant relationship was found between any of the spatial attributes measured and exotic plant species diversities, although total park area, # of disjunct core areas, and perimeter: area ratio were the three strongest predictors of exotic plant species abundances. These results indicate that native plant species in Kitchener and Waterloo’s urban natural areas are successfully out competing exotic plant species or, alternatively, that their core areas have become as equivalently invaded as their edges. Longer term and larger scale studies are necessary to substantiate these findings but smaller parks and parks with higher perimeter: area ratios should still be a management focus. Fragmentation of current natural areas and urbanization in close proximity to natural areas should also be minimized or avoided to decrease the risk of new invasions and establishment and exotic plant species.