Sustainability is usually defmed as a requirement to each generation to manage the resource base such that the average quality of life that it ensures itself can be shared by all future generations. When the consequences of each generation's management of the resource base are not deterministic, this definition can, however, not be used. The purpose of this note is to present a characterization...

Irrigation management has gained significance due to growing social needs and increasing command for food grains while the available resources have remained limited and scarce. Irrigation management includes optimal allocation of water for irrigation purposes, optimal cropping pattern for a given land area and water availabilities with an objective to maximize economic returns. In the present s...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Monsi and Saeki (1953) published the first mathematical model of canopy photosynthesis that was based on the light attenuation within a canopy and a light response of leaf photosynthesis. This paper reviews the evolution and development of their theory. SCOPE Monsi and Saeki showed that under full light conditions, canopy photosynthesis is maximized at a high leaf area ind...

Aerial and satellite imagery has a key role to play in natural resource management, especially in forestry application. The submetric resolution of the data enables to study forests at the scale of trees, and opens up new prospects to inventories in their will to get accurate assessment of the resources, with some automatic algorithms when possible. In this paper, we present a method to extract...

In this paper we develop a positive calibrated approach to stochastic dynamic programming. Risk aversion, discount rate, and intertemporal substitution preferences of the decision-maker are calibrated by a procedure that minimizes the mean squared error from data on past decisions. We apply this framework to managing stochastic water supplies from Oroville Reservoir, located in Northern Califor...

    Background: Assessment of hospitals’ performance in achieving its goals is a basic necessity. Measuring the efficiency of hospitals in order to boost resource productivity in healthcare organizations is extremely important. The aim of this study was to measure technical efficiency and determining status of resource allocation in some university hospitals, in Tehran, Iran.   Methods : This s...

Under the rising pressure for low carbon energy transitions in Northeast Asia (NEA), interconnecting local power grids interstate trade allows to share reserve capacity and redistribute intermittent renewable across time zones, contributing regional sustainability. Using a linear programming model that minimizes total system costs meet hourly demand, we build hypothetical electricity transmissi...

Diversity in a population is often cited as a major facilitator for the evolution of new complex features. The intuition behind this dynamic is that if a population is exploring multiple regions of a fitness landscape, more opportunities exist to find new functionality. We use the digital evolution software platform Avida to explore the effect of multiple limited resources on phenotypic Shannon...