In this dissertation, I use economic tools to address pressing issues associated with designing and managing conservation programs and evaluating the effectiveness of those programs. In the first essay, I derive the levels of policy instruments such as lump sum payments and annu…
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The global climate change mitigation initiative, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus (REDD+), has been seen as a new form of environmental rule to govern human-forest relationships. Through analyzing a case study of the Ulu Masen REDD+ project in Ac…
Malay civets in a dipterocarp rain forest were studied from December, 1995, through June, 1997, in the Ulu Segama Forest Reserve in Sabah, East Malaysia. To investigate the basic ecology of this species and explore the potential impact of selective logging, data on home range, a…
This dissertation studies the social effects of macroeconomic shocks and examines various ways to minimize unintended social consequences. In Part I, we study the impact of the Asian Crisis on land clearing behavior. Then, in Part II, we discuss how to design development interve…
The first essay analyzes the impact of two positive international trade policies on tropical deforestation in Indonesia: (1) a special incentives treatment under the current European Union (EU) Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) for countries that meet the International Tro…
I have developed a computer model, called GEOMOD, to simulate land use change and its consequences on biotic carbon exchanges between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere, using a spatial modeling approach. Land use change is a most important part of the anthropogenic distu…
The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis ) is one of the most rapidly expanding equatorial crops in the world. In the major oil palm-producing countries (e.g., Indonesia and Malaysia), oil palm agriculture poses a significant threat to tropical forests and biodiversity. On the other hand…
The Zagros oak forests in Western Iran are critically important to the sustainability of the region. These forests have undergone dramatic declines in recent decades. We evaluated the utility of the non-parametric Random Forest classification algorithm for land cover classificat…
The Ethiopian southwest is a global origin for Arabica coffee which is the second most traded global commodity after petroleum; and the most important agricultural commodity for Ethiopia. The region is also a global center of crop domestication and diversification with ancient a…
Global climate change is one of the defining issues of the 21st century. The phenomenon of natural climate variation being pushed beyond normal ranges has been fueled largely by industrial activities and those which support them (i.e. land-use change and the over-exploitation of…
Forests throughout the world continue to be in danger as a result of human activity. Although the average rate of deforestation has recently slowed, in some countries the rate of forest degradation remains high. Currently, numerous management efforts are underway to address this…
Many research studies have characterized the primary productivity of tropical forests and contributed to highlighting the complexity of underlying drivers of the ecological system. However, few studies have explored how productivity changes across multiple scales and how the dri…
Forest-savanna transitions are often discussed as systems that operate next to each other withdistinct woody species and separated into pyrogenic and non-pyrogenic systems with sharptransition between the two systems. It is often hypothesized that fires cannot enter closed canop…