Thesiss

Management and conservation of populations of animals requires information on where they are, why they are there, and where else they could be. These objectives are typically approached by collecting data on the animals’ use of space, relating these to prevailing environmental c…

This political methodology dissertation consists of several distinct essays that apply three new estimation techniques to all three subfields of the discipline—international relations, American politics and Comparative politics. The first is an application of reversible jump Mar…

The lasso and its successor, the elastic net, are two popular regularized regression methods which produce sparse models. We propose two different extensions to these methods that leverage feature information in the model-fitting process to improve predictive accuracy. The first…

The UN has designated 2021-2030 the decade of restoration, reflecting a global recognition that our planet is changing so rapidly that conservation alone is not enough, and we must restore some of the ecosystems we have lost. Ecosystems, however, are extremely complex and thus f…