Understanding Behavioral Responses of Wildlife to Traffic to Improve Mitigation Planning

Creating and maintaining sustainable transportation systems depends in part on understanding and mitigating ecological impacts. Wildlife crossing structures (WCS) are often used to mitigate impacts on wildlife populations. WCS and existing structures may provide passage for multiple species, depending on their sensitivity to traffic disturbance and perception of the roadway. In a previous project, the research team found that traffic conditions and traffic noise could reduce WCS effectiveness in facilitating passage of diverse and sensitive species. In the current project, they expanded the geographic scope to 26 sites throughout California, including detailed measurements of vehicle noise and lighting impacts on wildlife use of structures. They investigated individual animal behavior as the animals approached structures as a possible mechanism for reducing species diversity due to traffic disturbance. In order to inform future WCS planning, placement and construction, the team studied traffic noise and light impacts on wildlife in the vicinity of the proposed Liberty Canyon wildlife over-crossing (over US 101), the first and largest of its kind in California. They improved a preliminary statistical model of the effects of traffic on WCS use of existing structures. The authors recommend strategies for transportation agencies to use in developing and modifying WCS to improve wildlife passage.View the NCST Project Webpag

Incorporating Human Beliefs and Behaviors into Wildlife Ecology

Like much of the global biosphere, wildlife species have experienced rapid declines during the Anthropocene. Wildlife ecologists have responded to these crises by developing a range of technologies, techniques, and large datasets, which together have revolutionized the field, provided novel insights into the movements and behaviors of animals, and identified new risks and impacts to wildlife in a human-dominated world. While these advances have been vitally important, wildlife ecology has been slower to recognize and incorporate humans themselves into its new research domains. The chapters of this dissertation explore methods for better incorporating human behaviors, beliefs, actions, and infrastructure into the theories and approaches in wildlife ecology that have flourished in the last two decades. The research presented here demonstrates the importance of linking human beliefs and behaviors to wildlife ecology both by presenting novel findings and by showing the opportunities missed when narrow approaches are applied to complex socio-ecological problems.In Chapter 1, I provide a general introduction on the theories underlying this research, contextualize the research questions in light of the loss and recovery of large predators, and describe the research site where I collected much of the data for this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I apply the methods of movement ecology to some of the first fine-scale telemetry data collected on rifle hunters. I draw conclusions about their individual, site-level, and regional-level hunting behaviors and discuss the broad implications of these findings for hunting management. In Chapter 3, I examine livestock-predator conflict using approaches from both ecology and the social sciences. I describe a form of selection bias that is likely widespread but unreported due to the omission of social data from ecological models of conflict, and I offer guidelines for combining and translating ecological and social research on conflict. In Chapter 4, I explore the ecological impacts of one of the most globally widespread human constructions, the fence. I show for the first time the potential extent of fencing at large scales and discuss the wide variety of ecological effects of fences for both humans and ecosystems. I further highlight biases and gaps in fence research that have thus far limited a complete understanding of the environmental effects of these features. In Chapter 5, I conclude by making recommendations regarding how research might better incorporate human perceptions, decisions, and actions into ecology

New directions in water resources management: The role of water pricing policies

Water resources will face increasing competition and higher environmental concerns during this century. To meet these challenges, the new Water Framework Directive has drawn up an integrated framework and established the basic principles for a sustainable water policy in the European Union. The introduction of water prices reflecting the true cost of irrigation is one of its most innovative components. In this paper, a positive mathematical programming model is developed to assess the environmental and socio-economic impacts of water pricing policies in Spanish irrigated lands. The model interface allows friendly use and easy replication in a large number of irrigation districts, selected throughout the Spanish territory. The model results show the impact on environmental indicators, water consumption, cropping patterns, technology adoption, labor, farmers' income, and the water agency revenues when different scenarios of cost recovery are considered. It is argued that this modeling approach may be used as a management tool to assist in the implementation of the cost recovery approach of the new Water Framework Directive

The Impact of Experiential Augmented Reality Applications on Fashion Purchase Intention

Utilizing the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of augmented reality (AR) (specifically augmentation) on consumers’ affective and behavioral response and to assess whether consumers’ hedonic motivation for shopping moderates this relationship. An experiment using the manipulation of AR and no AR was conducted with 162 participants aged between 18 and 35. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling and randomly assigned to the control or stimulus group. The hypothesized associations were analyzed using linear regression with bootstrapping. The paper demonstrates the benefit of using an experiential AR retail application (app) to positively impact purchase intention. The results show this effect is mediated by positive affective response. Furthermore, hedonic shopping motivation moderates the relationship between augmentation and the positive affective response. Because of the chosen research approach, the results may lack generalizability to other forms of augmentation. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed model using different types of AR stimuli. Furthermore, replication of the study with other populations would increase the generalizability of the findings. Results of this study provide a valuable reference for retailers of the benefits of using AR when attempting to optimize experiential value in online environments. The study contributes to experiential retail and consumer purchase behavior research by deepening the conceptualization of the impact of experiential technologies, more specifically AR apps, by considering the role of hedonic shopping motivations.Peer reviewe

ILR Faculty Research in Progress, 2016-2017

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.ResearchinProgress_2016_17.pdf: 38 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Predicting the poverty impacts of trade reform

An important area of research in recent years involves assessing the microeconomic implications of macro-level policies-particularly those related to international trade. While a wide range of research methodologies are available for assessing the microeconomic incidence of micro-policies, as well as for assessing the effect of macro-level policies on markets and broad groups of households, there is a gap when it comes to eliciting the disaggregated household and firm level effects of trade policies. Recent research addresses this knowledge gap and the present survey offers an overview of this literature. The preponderance of the evidence from the studies encompassed by this survey points to the dominance of earnings-side effects over consumption-side effects of trade reform. This is problematic, since household surveys are notable for their underreporting of income. From the perspective of the poor, it is the market for unskilled labor that is most important. The poverty effects of trade policy often hinge crucially on how well the increased demand for labor in one part of the economy is transmitted to the rest of the economy by way of increased wages, increased employment, or both. Further econometric research aimed at discriminating between competing factor mobility hypotheses is urgently needed.Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth,Health Economics&Finance

Improving Livability Using Green and Active Modes: A Traffic Stress Level Analysis of Transit, Bicycle, and Pedestrian Access and Mobility

Understanding the relative attractiveness of alternatives to driving is vitally important toward lowering driving rates and, by extension, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), traffic congestion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, etc. The relative effectiveness of automobile alternatives (i.e., buses, bicycling, and walking) depends on how well streets are designed to work for these respective modes in terms of safety, comfort and cost, which can sometimes pit their relative effectiveness against each other. In this report, the level of traffic stress (LTS) criteria previously developed by two of the authors was used to determine how the streets functioned for these auto alternative modes. The quality and extent of the transit service area was measured using a total travel time metric over the LTS network. The model developed in this study was applied to two transit routes in Oakland, California, and Denver, Colorado

Calculating the Cost of Environmental Regulation

Decisions concerning environmental protection hinge on estimates of economic burden. Over the past 30 years, economists have developed and applied various tools to measure this burden. In this paper, developed as a chapter for the Handbook of Environmental Economics, we present a taxonomy of costs along with methods for measuring those costs. At the broadest level, we distinguish between partial and general equilibrium costs. Partial equilibrium costs represent the burden directly borne by the regulated entity (firms, households, government), including both pecuniary and nonpecuniary expenses, when prices are held constant. General equilibrium costs reflect the net burden once all good and factor markets have equilibrated. In addition to partial equilibrium costs, these general equilibrium costs include welfare losses or gains in markets with preexisting distortions, welfare losses or gains from rebalancing the government's budget constraint, and welfare gains from the added flexibility of meeting pollution constraints through reductions in the use of higher-priced, pollution-intensive products. In addition to both partial and general equilibrium costs, we also consider the distribution of costs across households, countries, sectors, subnational regions, and generations. Despite improvements in our understanding of cost measurement, we find considerable opportunity for further work and, especially, better application of existing methods.social cost, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, environmental regulation