O nce you get to Swanton Pacific Ranch in the coastal mountains north of Santa Cruz, it's pretty obvious the 3,200-acre spread offers many things you just won't find at Cal Poly: trees, for one thing. A whole forest full of them 2,100 acres to be exact. They cover steep mountain slopes and march in tall columns down to grassy meadows. A river runs through it: Scott Creek and its tributaries. "T...

This paper analyzes regulatory design for agroecosystem management on public rangelands. We present an informational and institutional environment where three of the most prominent regulatory instruments on public rangelands – input regulation, cost-sharing/taxation, and performance regulation – can be defined and compared. The paper examines how the optimal regulation is shaped by the informat...

Prior research has shown that deforestation in the southwestern Amazon enhances the formation of nonprecipitating shallow cumulus clouds, while deep cumulus convection was favored over forested land. The research presented here further investigates the trends of hydrometeors in the area by examining how precipitation frequency changes as a function of distance to the forest’s edge. Measurements...

We consider the problem of taking an opaque forest and determining the regions that are covered by it. We provide a tight upper bound on the complexity of this problem, and an algorithm for computing this area, which is worst-case optimal.

Permanent plots in indigenous forests administered by the Department of Conservation's West Coast Conservancy in the National Vegetation Survey (NVS) database were analysed to show which forest types were adequately sampled according to identifiable forest types, and within each type, in space and in time. From 404 permanent forest plots considered in analysis, eight forest types were determine...