Practical Lessons in Applied Resource Valuation: Evaluating Bintuni Bay

The basic objective of the study was to conduct an environmental economic analysis of the various activities taking place in the Bintuni Bay area. The Ministry of Environment was, at that time, starting to close down non-sustainable logging operations while also promoting the conservation of important natural areas. The analysis would provide insights into optimal conservation and development strategies for the resource. Such an analysis needed to be provided quickly to senior policy makers. The entire project from inception, to field work, to analysis, to input into the decision-making process via a workshop of senior policy-makers took less than one-half of one year to complete. Timely delivery of an understandable analytical product was therefore an important aspect of the study.Resource valuation

Environmental economics and coral reef management : needs and opportunities for research in South East Asia; plenary paper

Meeting: EEPSEA Biannual Workshop, 12th, 11-14 May, 1999, Singapore, SG"Background paper prepared for presentation to the 12th Biannual Workshop of EEPSEA

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Environmental Economics and Coral Reef Management: Needs and Opportunities for Research in SE Asia

From 1994 to 1998, EEPSEA approved some 65 research projects in environmental economic analysis. Of these, 38 related to "brown" environmental issues, 23 to "green" issues, and four to other issues. None pertained to coral reefs. This relative dearth of coral reef analysis is mirrored in the broader literature; only seven separate environmental economic studies have been undertaken that address policy concerns in SE Asia or nearby areas on Papua New Guineas and Australias Great Barrier Reef. This paper calls on researchers to pay greater attention to the "blue" dimension of our global environment, commencing with the coral reef ecosystems. Coral reefs in SE Asia represent about 30% of the worlds reefs. They are currently undergoing unprecedented levels of degradation from stresses such as sedimentation, pollution, blast and cyanide fishing, and coral bleaching. Institutional weakness is pervasive and the proliferation of "paper parks" marine protected areas with no effective protection is alarming. Economic valuation of the coral reef asset, and of the damages wrought by institutional failures and various direct stresses, is thus of substantial policy interest. The paper provides a simple "benefit transfer" calculation using conventional methods, calculating a value of US$1.4 trillion for SE Asias coral reefs. The flaws inherent in such an analysis, however, are discussed in some detail; they underline a greater need for original site-specific empirical studies that reflect local system complexities and local policy needs. The paper summarizes conditions in the EEPSEA maritime countries Cambodia, China (including Taiwan), Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam and outlines potential policy priorities in each of these. Environmental economic analysis can assist in addressing some of these priorities through: (i) increasing awareness of absolute and relative economic values; and, (ii) providing valuation estimates that can assist in coral reef management.Coral reef, South East Asia