Nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners have been major players in increasing forest productivity and improving forest health. Understanding what factors influence landowner participation in government programs, and furthermore, what factors determinate how quickly after harvest landowners regenerate, is critical for developing policies to improve landowner participation in government assistance programs and timely regeneration of harvested lands. Two studies were conducted to investigate these issues. The necessary data were obtained through a 2006 telephone survey of randomly selected Mississippi NIPF landowners. Factors considered included an array of land, ownership, management, and demographic characteristics. In the first study, a two-step landowner behavior model was constructed to explain NIPF landowner participation in government incentive programs, conditional on their awareness of these programs. The second study used duration analysis to analyze the time elapsed between harvest and regeneration. Interest in timber production, past regeneration experience, education, and membership in forestry organization influenced NIPF landowner knowledge of incentive programs and were significant predictors of participation. Those NIPF landownersn who regenerated, did so on average, 11 months after harvest. After the 16th month following harvest, the probability of regenerating harvested lands decreased rapidly. The interval between harvest and reforestation was reduced by maintaining an interest in timber production, consulting a forester to coordinate the harvest, residing on the forest land, having planted pines, and increasing timber prices.

For synthetic aperture imaging, position and orientation deviation is of great concern. Unknown motions of a Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) can blur the reconstructed images and degrade image quality considerably. Considering the high sensitivity of synthetic aperture imaging technique to sonar deviation, this research aims at providing a thorough navigation solution for a free-towed synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) comprising aspects from the design and construction of the navigation card through to data postprocessing to produce position, velocity, and attitude information of the sonar. The sensor configuration of the designed navigation card is low-cost Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) Magnetic, Angular Rate, and Gravity (MARG) sensors including three angular rate gyroscopes, three dual-axial accelerometers, and a triaxial magnetic hybrid. These MARG sensors are mounted orthogonally on a standard 180mm Eurocard PCB to monitor the motions of the sonar in six degrees of freedom. Sensor calibration algorithms are presented for each individual sensor according to its characteristics to precisely determine sensor parameters. The nonlinear least square method and two-step estimator are particularly used for the calibration of accelerometers and magnetometers. A quaternion-based extended Kalman filter is developed based on a total state space model to fuse the calibrated navigation data. In the model, the frame transformations are described using quaternions instead of other attitude representations. The simulations and experimental results are demonstrated in this thesis to verify the capability of the sensor fusion strategy.

This paper is concerned with estimation of space-time shot-noise Cox process parametric models. We introduce the two-step estimation method, where in the second step we use composite likelihood or Palm likelihood. For the two-step estimation method based on Palm likelihood we prove consistency and asymptotic normality theorem. Finally we compare composite likelihood with Palm likelihood in simulation studies, where we add for comparison minimum contrast method. Results for minimum contrast method are taken from the literature. 1