Environmental decisions must satisfy a multitude of objectives and the matching of a plan, policy or project to such objectives is a matter of both facts and value judgements. Value Functions for Environmental Management provides a systematic approach to the structuring and measurement of value judgements, showing how they drive the decision process and how to make them transparent and effective in support of complex decisions. The value functions that the book describes ...

The idea of this book started at approximately 33.000 feet, somewhere above the Alps. On our way to a workshop in Venice we had the opportunity of appreciating the different types of landscapes and the complex patchwork of urban areas, agriculture, forests, rivers and lakes that can be seen from an aircraft. The complexity of this puzzle, and the complex task of managing its evolution, became the topic of conversation for the rest of the flight. It also became the topic of this book. Land-...

This book gives a comprehensive view of the developed procrustes models, including the isotropic, the generalized and the anisotropic variants. These represent original tools to perform, among others, the bundle block adjustment and the global registration of multiple 3D LiDAR point clouds. Moreover, the book also reports the recently derived total least squares solution of the anisotropic Procrustes model, together with its practical application in solving the exterior orientation of one ...

Gerd Gigerenzer's influential work examines the rationality of individuals not from the perspective of logic or probability, but from the point of view of adaptation to the real world of human behavior and interaction with the environment. Seen from this perspective, human behavior is more rational than it might otherwise appear. This work is extremely influential and has spawned an entire research program. This volume (which follows on a previous collection, Adaptive Thinking, al...

Ecological Models and Data in R is the first truly practical introduction to modern statistical methods for ecology. In step-by-step detail, the book teaches ecology graduate students and researchers everything they need to know in order to use maximum likelihood, information-theoretic, and Bayesian techniques to analyze their own data using the programming language R. Drawing on extensive experience teaching these techniques to graduate students in ecology, Benjamin Bolker shows ...

Bayesian statistics has exploded into biology and its sub-disciplines, such as ecology, over the past decade. The free software program WinBUGS, and its open-source sister OpenBugs, is currently the only flexible and general-purpose program available with which the average ecologist can conduct standard and non-standard Bayesian statistics. - Comprehensive and richly commented examples illustrate a wide range of models that are most relevant to the research of a modern population ecologist...

This lively and engaging book explains the things you have to know in order to read empirical papers in the social and health sciences, as well as the techniques you need to build statistical models of your own. The discussion in the book is organized around published studies, as are many of the exercises. Relevant journal articles are reprinted at the back of the book. Freedman makes a thorough appraisal of the statistical methods in these papers and in a variety of other examples. He ill...

An understanding of statistics and experimental design is essential for life science studies, but many students lack a mathematical background and some even dread taking an introductory statistics course. Using a refreshingly clear and encouraging reader-friendly approach, this book helps students understand how to choose, carry out, interpret and report the results of complex statistical analyses, critically evaluate the design of experiments and proceed to more advanced material. Taking ...

Why is trade in wholesale water so rare, when markets can actively trade bread, tractors, and electricity? This book shows that water markets fail because of high transaction costs, resulting in inefficient allocations and unpredictable environmental effects. To overcome these obstacles, this book proposes a trading mechanism called a smart market. A smart market is an auction cleared with optimization. A smart market can reduce the transaction costs of water trading, while improving the e...

This book has the purpose of providing the "state of the arts" concerning bio-economic modelling dealing with agricultural systems. In most cases, the contributions use a methodology combining the use of biophysical and economic models, in all cases, an engineering production function approach is totally or partially applied. This practice is being developed in the last years as a response to concrete policy matters: agricultural policies are increasingly combined with environmental and na...

This book provides a first synthetic view of an emerging area of ecology and biogeography, linking individual- and population-level processes to geographic distributions and biodiversity patterns. Problems in evolutionary ecology, macroecology, and biogeography are illuminated by this integrative view. The book focuses on correlative approaches known as ecological niche modeling, species distribution modeling, or habitat suitability modeling, which use associations between known occurrence...

This book provides an overview of the state of animal agriculture and present methodologies and proposals to develop policies that result in sustainable and profitable animal production that will protect human and environmental health, enhance livelihood of smallholders and meet consumer needs. The book combines lessons of the past, factual foundation to understand the present, analytical tools to design and improve policies, case studies that provide both empirical grounding and applicati...