Ecosystem Service Market Development: The Role and Opportunity for Finance

This report is laid out as a progressive exploration of how the economics of ES production interacts with finance, broadly construed, in actual credit transactions. The inquiry proceeds in several steps. First, the economics of ecosystem services production is explored to provide critical context for potential financing approaches. This section examines dynamics of production under a number of incentive mechanisms currently employed to produce ecosystem services and also considers how economic incentives affect policy goals. The paper next turns to the role of finance in ES production, examining project cash flows and how financing directly enables development of ES credits through on-the-ground projects. The following section considers the breadth of sources for project finance, with a particular focus on how project design and characteristics shape access to government, philanthropic, and private capital sources. With this framework established, financing tools and recommendations are explored with an emphasis on how different approaches can influence key drivers of access to project funding. Input from stakeholder and financier interviews, as well as workshop findings, are integrated throughout. A brief conclusion completes the report

Transportation and the environment : a research agenda for Oregon : final report

The Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient, Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) has established two new research programs – the Surface Transportation Environment Planning (STEP) Cooperative Research Program and the Future Strategic Highway Research Program II (F-SHRP II). The creation of these new programs provides an opportunity for transportation professionals in government, education and industry to address research needs related to transportation and the environment. In February 2006 Oregon State University hosted a workshop – Transportation and the Environment: Linking Researchers, Transportation Providers and Industry – attended by nearly 50 participants representing transportation providers, industry leaders, and academic researchers for the specific purpose of creating a transportation and the environment research agenda. The participants discussed needs and opportunities in the areas of ecology and natural systems, land-use, planning and performance measures, emerging technologies, and environmental and socioeconomic relationships. Key needs and opportunities were identified, and an attempt was made to categorize the needed research. Among the needs and opportunities for transportation and the environment research, the following ideas rose to the top during the workshop: -- Developing integrated decision-support systems; -- Identifying, developing, and testing opportunities in green infrastructure (including the localization of industries, such as clustering transportation industries, construction material use, and use of recycled materials); -- Developing a process for systematically repairing or replacing culverts within watersheds or ecoregions; and -- Identifying opportunities to study the relationships between transportation and the environment within the context of the development of new cities and community developments in Central and Northern Oregon. The authors recommend that the new Oregon University Transportation Center play a central role to continue and expand the momentum of this proposed research agenda, to help fulfill its potential, and to allow it to be refined and matured as collaborative partnerships grow and needs and opportunities present themselves

The Oregon blue book 1895 : describing the Oregon State government, Oregon legislators and prominent men

Gerald W. Williams Collectio

Summary of formulas for flat plates of plywood under uniform or concentrated loads

Information reviewed and reaffirmed June 1959. Date of original report February 13, 1942

OH #45AB_ Henry Otley.mp3

HARNEY COUNTY HISTORY PROJECT AV-Oral History #45 - Sides A/B Subject: Henry Otley Date: June 18, 1973 Place: Otley Home - Diamond, Oregon Interviewers: Pauline Braymen & Marcus Haine

Causes and Consequences of Timing Errors Associated With Global Positioning System Collar Accelerometer Activity Monitors

Direct behavioral observations of multiple free-ranging animals over long periods of time and large geographic areas is prohibitively difficult. However, recent improvements in technology, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) collars equipped with motion-sensitive activity monitors, create the potential to remotely monitor animal behavior. Accelerometer-equipped activity monitors quantify animal motion with different amounts of movement presumably corresponding to different animal activities. Variations in motion among species and differences in collar design necessitate calibration for each collar and species of interest. We paired activity monitor data collected using Lotek GPS_4400 collars worn by captive Rocky Mountain elk Cervus elaphus nelsoni with simultaneously collected behavior observations. During our initial data screening, we observed many sampling intervals of directly observed behavior that did not pair to activity monitor data in a logical fashion. For example, intervals containing behaviors associated with little or no motion sometimes aligned with relatively high activity monitor values. These misalignments, due to errors associated with collar timekeeping mechanisms, would likely result in inaccurate classification models. We corrected timing errors by using defined breaks in animal behavior to shift times given by collar output, improving the average correct classification rate 61.7 percentage points for specific behaviors. Furthermore, timing errors were significantly reduced by increasing the GPS fix rate, by using a sampling interval divisible by 8 seconds, and by accurately timing the initial collar activation. Awareness and management of collar timing error will enable users to obtain the best possible estimates of true behavior when calibrating these collars and interpreting data from free-ranging animals.Keywords: GPS collars, Accelerometers, Behavior tracking, Elk, Activity monitors, Timing error

Improvements in pollutant monitoring: Optimizing silicone for co-deployment with polyethylene passive sampling devices

Sequestering semi-polar compounds can be difficult with low-density polyethylene (LDPE), but those pollutants may be more efficiently absorbed using silicone. In this work, optimized methods for cleaning, infusing reference standards, and polymer extraction are reported along with field comparisons of several silicone materials for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and pesticides. In a final field demonstration, the most optimal silicone material is coupled with LDPE in a large-scale study to examine PAHs in addition to oxygenated-PAHs (OPAHs) at a Superfund site. OPAHs exemplify a sensitive range of chemical properties to compare polymers (log K[subscript ow] 0.2–5.3), and transformation products of commonly studied parent PAHs. On average, while polymer concentrations differed nearly 7-fold, water-calculated values were more similar (about 3.5-fold or less) for both PAHs (17) and OPAHs (7). Individual water concentrations of OPAHs differed dramatically between silicone and LDPE, highlighting the advantages of choosing appropriate polymers and optimized methods for pollutant monitoring.This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Elsevier and can be found at: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/environmental-pollution/Keywords: OPAHs, Silicone, Oxygenated-PAHs, Passive sampling, Polyethylene, PAHs, Pesticide

Using post-settlement demography to estimate larval survivorship: a coral reef fish example

Many species have multi-stage life cycles in which the youngest stages (e.g., larvae) are small, dispersive, and abundant, whereas later stages are sessile or sedentary. Quantifying survival throughout such early stages is critical for understanding dispersal, population dynamics, and life history evolution. However, dispersive stages can be very difficult to sample in situ, and estimates of survival through the entire duration of these stages are typically poor. Here we describe how demographic information from juveniles and adults can be used to estimate survival throughout a dispersive larval stage that was not sampled directly. Using field measurements of demography, we show that detailed information on post-settlement growth, survival, and reproduction can be used to estimate average larval survivorship under the assumption that a typical individual replaces itself over its lifetime. Applying this approach to a common coral reef fish (bicolor damselfish, Stegastes partitus), we estimated average larval survivorship to be 0.108 % (95 % CI 0.025–0.484). We next compared this demography-based estimate to an expected value derived from published estimates of larval mortality rates. Our estimate of larval survivorship for bicolor damselfish was approximately two orders of magnitude greater than what would be expected if larval mortality of this species followed the average, size-dependent pattern of mortality inferred from a published sample of marine fishes. Our results highlight the importance of understanding mortality during the earliest phases of larval life, which are typically not sampled, as well as the need to understand the details of how larval mortality scales with body size.This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Springer and can be found at: http://link.springer.com/journal/442Keywords: Net reproductive rate, Larval mortality, Allometry, Recruitment, Size-dependent mortalityKeywords: Net reproductive rate, Larval mortality, Allometry, Recruitment, Size-dependent mortalit

Variable Selection in High-dimensional Varying-coefficient Models with Global Optimality

The varying-coefficient model is flexible and powerful for modeling the dynamic changes of regression coefficients. It is important to identify significant covariates associated with response variables, especially for high-dimensional settings where the number of covariates can be larger than the sample size. We consider model selection in the high-dimensional setting and adopt difference convex programming to approximate the L₀ penalty, and we investigate the global optimality properties of the varying-coefficient estimator. The challenge of the variable selection problem here is that the dimension of the nonparametric form for the varying-coefficient modeling could be infinite, in addition to dealing with the high-dimensional linear covariates. We show that the proposed varying-coefficient estimator is consistent, enjoys the oracle property and achieves an optimal convergence rate for the non-zero nonparametric components for high-dimensional data. Our simulations and numerical examples indicate that the difference convex algorithm is efficient using the coordinate decent algorithm, and is able to select the true model at a higher frequency than the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), the adaptive LASSO and the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) approaches.Keywords: Difference convex programming, Oracle property, Coordinate decent algorithm, Large-p small-n, Nonparametric function, L [subscript 0-] regularization, Truncated L[subscript 1] penalty, Model selectionKeywords: Difference convex programming, Oracle property, Coordinate decent algorithm, Large-p small-n, Nonparametric function, L [subscript 0-] regularization, Truncated L[subscript 1] penalty, Model selectio