Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2009, Environmental Studies (Arts and Sciences)

This research investigated the effects of social, economic and other factors contributing to the forestry sector of Nepal. Based on literature and socio-economic conditions of Nepal, various variables are included as main cause of deforestation in Nepal. The concept of econometrics and regression model is used. The results indicated a significant link between the several included variables and the changes in forest land in Nepal. The results also suggest that increased productions of forest products and social unrest in the country are the main negative contributors to the forestry sector of Nepal. Social Unrest is found to be the most significant variable affecting the forest land of Nepal. From this study, timber production found to be the major culprit causing more negative effect to the forest land of Nepal compared to fuelwood production. Furthermore, the various policy efforts taken indicate that Community Forestry is the best policy option available but some changes needs to be done to avoid the loopholes and improve its efficiency.

Committee: Roy G. Boyd PhD (Committee Chair); Michele Morrone PhD (Committee Member); Shamila A. Jayasuriya PhD (Committee Member); Ariaster B. Chimeli PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

From a farmer to a policymaker, various stakeholders influence and are affected by the agricultural environment. This dissertation includes three essays that delve into the decision-making within the agricultural environment, exploring the incentives and outcomes for the stakeholders involved. With a focus on countries significant for global agriculture and food supply, these essays have important implications domestically and for the United States. My first essay evaluates herding as a potential source of bias in the USDA's international baseline projections. As USDA's annual Agricultural Baseline Projections contribute significantly to agricultural policy in the United States, their accuracy is vital. Although the bias in the baselines has been documented in the literature, its sources have not been evaluated yet. I propose herding, a behavioral phenomenon, as a potential bias-inducing choice in the preparation of the projections. My results provide strong evidence for the herding of projection trends toward the United States and suggest that herding is rational and error-reducing only for corn yield and wheat import projections but not for other crops and variables, thereby impacting not only the agricultural policy in the US but also global agricultural markets. The second essay evaluates the impact of an environmental policy that restricts land use for farmers in the context of the Brazilian Amazon, an area of crucial importance for global food supply. By analyzing the effects on both landowning farmers and landless peasants, this study examines the incentives generated and their subsequent influence on illegal occupations and land conflicts. The findings suggest that the policy leads to an increase in illegal occupations while decreasing land conflicts. Furthermore, by exploring heterogeneity in the impact relative to land values, I find that landowning farmers and squatters both make strategic choices about whether to engage in conflict depending on the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ani Katchova (Advisor); Brian Roe (Committee Member); Leah Bevis (Advisor) Subjects: Agriculture; Economics; Environmental Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

The forest ecosystem can be affected by forest distribution changes, management changes, and forest loss. Change to forest ecosystems is not only an environmental science problem but also an economic problem since both market and policy changes can influence forest ecosystems. The three chapters of my dissertation discuss the impacts of timber market change on forest distribution, explore how forest policy change affects forest planting investments in another region, and illustrate the relationship between overlapping tenure and forest loss. The first chapter examines the distribution and movement of forest species in the Eastern and Southeastern US with a spatial logistic model and assesses how natural and socioeconomic factors have influenced forest migration. In this research, we derive a 30-year presence/absence dataset from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database. The species distribution analysis suggests that besides climatological and geophysical factors, socioeconomic factors can also impact the probability of the presence of tree species. Furthermore, the impact of timber prices varies on trees of different ages. This research highlights how timber market variations can impact forest distribution by influencing landowners' management decisions. Our findings highlight the unintended environmental consequences of changes in timber and agriculture markets. The environmental policies, such as habitat protection and forest preservation, should take timber market consequences into consideration The second chapter examines how federal timber harvesting restrictions in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s resulted in an increase in softwood planting in the Southern US. This is one of few papers that discuss the change in investment in planting caused by a policy change in another region. This study develops a unique dataset of county-level loblolly planting derived from historical timber inventory data. The results indicate that the loblolly pl (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brent Sohngen (Advisor); H. Allen Klaiber (Committee Member); Daniela A. Miteva (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Economics; Forestry

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2021, Environmental Studies (Voinovich)

In the tropics, deforestation is the most significant contributor to biodiversity loss, land degradation, habitat fragmentation, and climate variation. In the Neotropics, the main driver of deforestation is the expansion of the agricultural frontier. The forests of Nicaragua are home to 2% of the world's species, passages of Central American wildlife, and most of the indigenous communities in the Caribbean. The autocratic government of Nicaragua has endangered the preservation of its forests due to negligence in its protection and in the search for the well-being of the people who live around it, even if the forests are within a protected area. In collaboration with Centro Humboldt in Nicaragua, I created an Indio Maiz Biological Reserve map with a 10 km buffer zone for 2020. I compared it with two maps made by the Ministry of the Environmental and Centro Humboldt from 2010 and 2015, respectively. I mapped land-use changes in Indio Maiz Biological Reserve in Nicaragua between 2010 and 2020 in five-year increments. The creation of this set of maps of land-cover changes over time enabled the calculation of deforestation and forest fragmentation rates and the comparison of data inside and outside protected areas. This mapping included identifying main economic activities, including cattle ranching, perennial plantations, annual crops, and gold mining. The creation of this 2020 map made it possible to calculate deforestation rates inside and outside protected areas, with a special focus on the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve (IM). The maps showed a higher deforestation rate per year outside (-3.2%) than inside (-2.5%) Indio Maiz Biological Reserve between 2010 and 2020. However, the deforestation rate increased nine times inside the protected area between 2010 and 2020, while it decreased by half outside the biological reserve in the same period. Deforestation is scattered in IM, gradually thinning the forests to pasture and reducing its core zone. The land-use change (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Geoffrey D. Dabelko (Advisor); Geoffrey D. Dabelko (Committee Chair); Geoffrey L. Buckley (Committee Member); Brad D. Jokisch (Committee Member) Subjects: Biology; Conservation; Environmental Studies; Geography; Remote Sensing

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2021, Environmental Studies (Voinovich)

Flood analyses have historically been conducted using the stationarity principle, which assumes a constant hydrological regime within a river system. This research echoed previous studies challenging the assumption of stationarity for the purposes of flood analyses. The Greenbrier River watershed in West Virginia fit criteria for questioning the stationarity principle as it experienced dramatic forest harvesting activities in the late 1800s and has suffered deadly floods in the last four decades. This research questioned the stationarity assumption by testing hydrological data using Pearson's and Pettitt's tests. Additionally, two scenarios were developed to spatially model runoff travel time for a forested and deforested watershed. Stationarity was confirmed for the Greenbrier River. The study showed no evidence of non-stationarity in the hydrological time series of the river, despite widespread changes in land use across the study period. Similarly, spatial modeling of total runoff travel time estimation between watershed scenarios did not drastically vary.

Committee: Gregory Springer Dr. (Committee Chair); Natalie Kruse Dr. (Committee Member); Jenny Schenk Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Studies; Geographic Information Science; Geomorphology; Hydrology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays. All three essays explore how individuals make decisions in response to natural and man-made environmental changes in developing countries and how these individual behaviors lead to aggregate effects on the environment. In Chapter 2, I estimate the causal effect of municipal road expansion on Vehicle -Kilometers Traveled (VKT) in 103 Chinese cities while accounting for the potential for increased car adoption to affect VKT. A novel matching IV strategy is developed to address endogeneity concerns that complements previously used historical infrastructure instruments to provide time-varying identification in a panel data setting. I find that the estimated elasticity of VKT with respect to road length is approximately 1.1, indicating that newly built urban roads lead to a more than proportional increase in total traffic. Given large ongoing infrastructure investment combined with more recently enacted traffic alleviation policies in many Chinese cities, this result provides important new information on the potential impacts of infrastructure investment on traffic. In Chapter 3, I develop a novel compensating differential model of quality of life rankings with an agricultural sector. I introduce an additional farm income component into the household budget in the theoretical equilibrium system alongside housing and labor markets. I apply this model in a developing country, Indonesia, to examine the existence of compensating differentials and recover quality-of-life rankings for jurisdictions across the country at distinct time periods. To conduct the research, I use detailed household data from the fourth and fifth waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) fielded in 2007 and 2014 across 11 provinces in Indonesia. I estimate implicit prices for various amenities based on hedonic equations of housing rents, non-farm wages and agricultural returns. The results indicate that compensating differentials exist across t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Allen Klaiber (Advisor); Daniela Miteva (Committee Member); Sathya Gopalakrishnan (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Environmental Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

This dissertation examines the conservation and economic development effects of community forest management in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR). Maintaining the world's forest resources in developing countries has been a difficult, but necessary task since conserving tropical forests is crucial for preserving biodiversity and sequestering carbon. However, many communities located near the forest depend on extracting forest resources as a source of income and many governments in developing countries cannot devote enough resources to enforce forest protection efforts. This creates an overexploitation problem since many of these forests are common-pool resources that are rivalrous and non-excludable because of the lack of enforcement of the ill-defined property rights. To remedy this issue, some countries have provided communal property rights to encourage sustainable resource use (Ostrom 1990; Schlager and Ostrom, 1992). The idea is that households will work together and monitor each other to protect the area of land to which they have property rights from over exploitation. In exchange, the group that manages the area is given exclusive access to the forest resources and is able to earn a sustainable source of income. However, for community-based forest management to have a higher likelihood of being effective, households that are participating in the forest management system can receive an incentive in addition to the forest being conserved. The goal of this dissertation is to assess whether the economic development and conservation benefits of the community forest concessions in the Maya Biosphere Reserve are effective and whether receiving payments for strict conservation would be preferred by households. Chapter 1 is an introduction into community forestry and the background of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of concession membership on annual household income to determine if the benefits of participating in community (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brent Sohngen (Advisor); Daniela Miteva (Committee Member); Abdoul Sam (Committee Member); Frank Lupi (Committee Member) Subjects: Conservation; Economics; Environmental Economics; Forestry

MA, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Geography

Deforestation is a major driver of global climate change and the causes and consequences of deforestation are largely societal. Forested areas in the Russian Federation have a particularly important role, mainly due to the size, location, and growth periods of the boreal, coniferous, and deciduous forests. Understanding the causes of deforestation also requires a comprehension of the changes that have occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the nearly twenty-five years, which have passed since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a number of political, economic, and social dynamics have changed the landscape of the country both physically and institutionally. Two Russian cities, Moscow and Vladivostok, will serve as comparative case studies of the human environment dynamics across different natural environments, economic industries, and population centers in the country. In order to assess how human dimensions like urban expansion, supply and demand, and national/regional forest sector legislation have influenced land cover change; a mixed methods investigation is deployed. The investigation depends on both spatial evidence of land cover changes via remote sensing and analysis of human drivers such as policy, markets, and agriculture. Landsat images will be analyzed using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and other classification queries. Content analysis of national forest policy will also serve to bolster where and why deforestation occurred. It is expected that deforestation is an outcome of complex social processes and in most cases the drivers of land cover change are multi-dimensional and require moving beyond analysis of single causal mechanisms such as urban expansion through the clearing of forested land. In other words, deforestation is not simply driven by proximate causes such as the cutting down of trees for usage elsewhere or the opening of new land for use. The clearing of forests in Russia is one (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Tyner (Advisor); V. Kelly Turner (Committee Member); Mandy Munro-Stasiuk (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2018, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

Changes in forest cover especially changes within tropical forests, affect global climate change, together with ecosystems and forest carbon. Forests play a key role in both carbon emission and carbon sequestration. Efforts to reduce emissions through reduced deforestation and degradation of forests have become a common discussion among scientists and politicians under the auspices of the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD Programme). This dissertation research assessed the impacts of land use land cover change upon ecosystem services from a protected area focusing on forest carbon distribution and vegetation mapping using remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS). I also assessed Rwanda's preparedness in the United Nations global program, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verifying (REDD+MMRV). I carried out research in Nyungwe National Park (NNP), one of four National Parks of Rwanda. NNP is a montane tropical forest located in the Albertine Rift, one of the most biodiverse places in central and east Africa. I used remote sensing and field data collection from December 2011 and July 2012 in the western part of the Park to assess distribution and quantities of aboveground (ABG) forest carbon using generalized allometric functions. Using Landsat data together with 2009 high resolution color orthophotos and groundtruthing, I analyzed land cover changes between 1986 and 2011 for NNP. The land-use land cover change analysis showed that between 1986 and 1995 there was a minor increase in forest cover from 53% to 58% while from 1995-2003 a substantial decrease in forest cover occurred. Between 2003 and 2011 was a period of recovery with forest cover increasing by 59%. Vegetation analysis based on a 2009 Park biodiversity survey yielded 13 vegetation communities based on dominant and co-dominant species. Macaranga kilimandschar (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beth Kaplin PhD (Committee Chair); Peter Palmiotto DF (Committee Member); Naikoa Aguilar-Amuchastegui PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Studies; Geographic Information Science; Remote Sensing

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Arts and Sciences: Biological Sciences

Tropical and temperate plant species in forests around the world are threatened by human-induced land-use changes which produce various outcomes such as increased spread of invasive species, habitat fragmentation, and alterations of community structure among others. These factors can lower population sizes and genetic diversity levels of native plant species, making the risk of extinction imminent. Methodologies to mitigate such effects can involve introducing endangered plant species back to their native habitats either via in situ management of exploited species, or ex situ conservation. To study such species conservation, highly-replicated predictive computer modeling can be an inexpensive tool to suggest those scenarios that can better maintain viable population sizes and genetic diversity levels over the long term, since field studies are less feasible given the limited time and resources available. I used a species-specific, spatially-explicit, individual-based computer program (NEWGARDEN) capable of modeling and monitoring plant population growth and genetic diversity patterns in simulated stands over time to comparatively model various restoration methodologies for different threatened tree species. Specifically, I examined: 1) effective reintroduction geometries of the American chestnut; 2) sustainable spatial deforestation patterns for long-lived canopy tree species in tropical lowland rain forests (TLRFs); and 3) seed collection strategies capable of maximizing the harvest of genetic variation from rare TLRF tree species for use in developing ex situ rescue populations. These species conservation methodologies were tested under differing offspring and pollen dispersal distances, as this life-history trait can affect the spatial distribution of allelic diversity in populations. Results indicate that for reintroductions of the American chestnut, planting and stewarding a limited number of individuals at least 100m in from the preserve border (for (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Rogstad Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Theresa Culley Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephen Matter Ph.D. (Committee Member); Eric Maurer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephan Pelikan Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Botany

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2015, Environmental Studies (Voinovich)

This thesis is an analysis of land use patterns in the Copan Valley, Honduras. It is a comparative, GIS-based analysis of the archaeological/population site data of the ancient Copan Maya population (A.D. 250-1300) and the 1978 modern Copan Valley population. These two populations were compared to ascertain the resilience of the Valley's ecosystem over time. Time series data from the ancient Maya was combined with mean center and standard distances tests on both populations and these were overlain onto slope and aspect data to determine how both populations utilized similar landscapes. Results demonstrate that the ancient Mayan utilization of the valley was nonresilient, and unsustainable, while the 1978 population was also non resilient, and only currently sustainable due to outside markets.

Committee: AnnCorinne Freter-Abrams (Committee Chair); Elliot Abrams (Committee Member); Dorothy Sack (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Agriculture; Ancient Civilizations; Ancient History; Archaeology; Cultural Anthropology; Demography; Ecology; Environmental Philosophy; Environmental Science; Environmental Studies; Geographic Information Science; Latin American History; Latin American Studies; Sustainability

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

This research develops three essays on environmental issues in Brazil. The first two essays look at the effects of rural credit and land-use change in Brazil. Previous economic models have come to the conclusion that rural credit loans extended to farmers increases deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon region by encouraging land expansion. The first essay is an analysis of deforestation in the Legal Amazon region. The paper uses municipality-level panel data to examine the effects of rural credit on deforestation while controlling for land constraints. The hypothesis is that farmers that are land constrained do not use rural credit to deforest. The land constraints that are considered include high population pressures, abundance of low quality soil, high areas of savannah, and low quality transportation networks. These constraints are included in a regression analyses to explain deforestation through the use of dummy variables and the interaction of the dummy variables with rural credit. Key findings suggest that credit in municipalities with high rural populations is associated with a decrease in deforestation. Credit in municipalities with low quality soil is associated with an increase in deforestation, suggesting the credit incentivizes the clearing of otherwise marginal land. No conclusions can be made about the effects of cerrado and poor transportation networks. The second paper is a countrywide analysis of biofuel crop acreage response to credit availability and availability risk using municipality-level panel data. In the first step, the model employs a participation model using a logit regression to describe the factors that determine whether or not a given municipality planted a particular crop. In the second step, an OLS-regression is used to describe crop acreage as a function of acreage in the previous time period, expected prices, and rural credit. The analysis compares the acreage response of sugarcane to that of beans, coffee, soybeans, ric (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Haab (Advisor); Ian Sheldon (Committee Member); Brent Sohngen (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Environmental Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

The community forest concessions in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve provide a unique opportunity to investigate different aspects of community forest management. This dissertation examines the concessions in-depth and assesses the effectiveness of the concession policy in reducing deforestation, as well as how the preferences among concession members and non-members differ over various attributes of the concessions. The first chapter goes over the background and formation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve and the community forest concessions, which provides important context for the empirical analyses that follow. The second chapter examines how the heterogeneity of the concessions and their members affect deforestation in the reserve using matched difference-in-differences methods. The results indicate that the concession policy was effective in reducing deforestation among all types of concessions, although leakage was an issue in concessions comprised of recent immigrants that come from primarily agricultural backgrounds. The third chapter builds off the first by estimating selection bias due to the non-random assignment of areas into concession management that may not be controlled for in the matching process. This is possible due to the staggered timing of the formation of the concessions, where the treatment group is made up of the first concessions and the control group is comprised concessions that were created later. The results indicate that selection bias is present based on comparing the policy treatment effect using the later-formed concessions as a control group, with the treatment effect of a more traditional control group of adjacent forest areas. The fourth chapter uses data from a choice experiment conducted as part of a household survey of concession members and non-members. The experiment was designed to assess preferences over different attributes of the concessions, including the allocation of land to members, concession activities (ecotourism o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brent Sohngen (Advisor); Douglas Southgate (Committee Member); Brian Roe (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Economics

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : Geography

Scale effects on the performances of landscape metrics have attracted a lot of concern recently. Most studies have focused on two scale effects: changes in spatial resolution and changes in spatial extent. So far, little empirical analysis has been done on the effects of spatial aggregation (filtering) on landscape metrics. This research analyzed the effects of three types of changes in scale on the performances of eighteen commonly used landscape metrics. These changes include (1) varying spatial aggregation, (2) varying spatial resolution, and (3) varying spatial extent. Six time series Landsat images of Ariquemes (path/row: 232/67), Rondonia, Brazil were used in the analysis. A subset of relatively homogeneous area of 1024 x 1024 pixels (30.72 x 30.72 km) was used for testing effectiveness of eighteen landscape metrics for varying spatial aggregation and varying spatial resolution. For effects of spatial extent, this area serves as a maximum extent. The texture analysis with a window size of 15 x 15 pixels was used to distinguish naturally barren areas, which were subtracted from images of 1984 - 2000 before further image processing. Results show that PPU (NumP), ED (TE) and MNN are good indicators of landscape fragmentation, with PPU (NumP) the most sensitive to slight changes. Similarly, Sq and LSI are good indicators of landscape shape irregularity or complexity, with Sq the most sensitive to slight changes. Results also showed that LPI, which has been commonly used as an indicator of patch aggregation, should not be used to indicate landscape fragmentation, though it is a good index of landscape composition. The analysis of the time series images show that the most dramatic landscape fragmentation in the study area occurred from 1984 to 1989. However, since 1984, deforestation in the urban area tended to occur around urban centers, which was characterized by aggregation with more regular patch shapes. Conversely, rural area experienced increasing trends in la (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Robert C. Frohn (Advisor) Subjects: Geography

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Anthropology

Anthropogenic habitat disturbance can impact many facets of the lives of non-human primates. In this study, I investigate the consequences of anthropogenic habitat change on two sympatric neotropical primates, the white-faced capuchin (Cebus capucinus) and the mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata). By exploring the behavioral accommodations made by these flexible species, we may better understand the specific influences of anthropogenic habitat change on primate populations and, in turn, reduce our impact on these animals. This study tested variations in diet, ranging, activity budget, social behaviors, and human-monkey interactions between one human-commensal and one control troop of each species. The study population resided at the Refugio de Vida Silvestre Curu, a privately owned ranch and wildlife refuge in western Costa Rica that incorporates both anthropogenic and unmodified habitats. The commensal mantled howler monkey troop significantly differed from their forest-dwelling counterparts in terms of diet, home range size and activity budget. The commensal troop raided mango plantations, resulting in a more frugivorous diet (34% fruit) than that of the control group (26% fruit). The commensal troop also maintained a larger home range (41.6 hectares) than the control group (20.4 hectares). The commensal troop spent more of their time feeding and traveling, at 12% and 7% of the total activity budget, than did the control troop (6% feed, 5% travel). The commensal white-faced capuchin troop made significant adjustments to their diet, home range size, and social interactions. The commensal troop benefited from both raided crops and provisioned food items, resulting in a vastly different diet (69% fruit, 24% insects) than that of the wild-feeding control troop (24% fruit, 68% insects). The commensal white-faced capuchin troop also maintained a much larger home range than the control troop, with 66.2 and 26.54 hectares, respectively. The commensal troop had highe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: W. Scott McGraw PhD (Advisor); Douglas Crews PhD (Committee Member); Dawn Kitchen PhD (Committee Member); Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Behaviorial Sciences; Environmental Science; Zoology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

This dissertation addresses the evaluation of impact of access to credit on two different outcomes in rural households: cultivated land (and environmental degradation through erosion) and human capital formation. Three sets of difficulties are overcome. The fungibility of funds complicates inferences about uses of loan proceeds. Theoretical predictions about the impact of credit are not unambiguous, as credit is not a homogeneous good and it plays different roles in household strategies. Empirical tests must overcome self-selection and sample selection biases. Several channels for the impact of credit are identified. Access to credit influences land use decisions through risk-coping, liquidity, and income and wealth effects. Access to credit influences schooling decisions for children from borrowing families through income, risk-management, gender, information, and child-labor demand effects. Actual observed outcomes are the net result of these effects (some of them positive and some negative). Using a household theoretical model and a switching regressions empirical model, panel data from El Salvador are used to test for impacts of credit rationing. A positive effect of access to credit on natural resource conservation (through the release of pressures on fragile land) is identified in this country. Three surveys of clients of microfinance programs in Bolivia are used to infer a net positive effect of program participation on education outcomes, measured by a schooling gap. Policy dilemmas emerge from the negative impact of microfinance on child-labor demand.

Committee: Claudio Gonzalez-Vega (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, Agricultural

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2005, Environmental Studies (Arts and Sciences)

Shifting cultivation is a contributing activity of deforestation in the Venezuelan tropical forest. It involves slash-and burn techniques as a cheap mean for clearing forestland for agriculture that is not compatible for conservation area designation. This study focuses on a case-study of small farmers settled on a protected area in Venezuela and addresses the question of what are the social aspects of deforestation. The data used to explore these issues consist of a survey of 83 households in 2005. Overall, results indicate that origin, product markets, and off-farm labor opportunities influence deforestation decisions. Households with greater levels of education and off-farm labor income or wealth are relatively new to the area, and are more likely to use the land for residential or recreational purposes. This introduces a new land use system to the area that suggests further research for land use and conservation planning.

Committee: Nancy Bain (Advisor) Subjects: Geography

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2004, International Studies - Communication and Development Studies

Payment for Environmental Services is a market mechanism designed to achieve sustainable development, with beneficiaries of environmental services paying landholders whose resources provide those services. This thesis explores how opportunity costs of conservation can be a tool for designing effective payments. Interviews with smallholder farmers in Ecuador's Mazar Watershed were combined with secondary sources. The value of production per hectare per year, a proxy for farmers' opportunity costs, was calculated for three land uses: potato and corn cultivation, and dairy. The thesis demonstrates: 1. dairy farming's value of production is declining and does not constitute the highest return; 2. there are poor conditions for potato cultivation, generating a low value of production; 3. corn cultivation results in the highest value of production. Therefore, two scenarios for designing payments per hectare per year are suggested: the highest value of production, $239.13, and the value from a production mosaic, $190.40.

Committee: Brad Jokisch (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, Agricultural

BA, Oberlin College, 2010, History

This project examines the historical roots of deforestation during Madagascar's colonial period in order to shed light on contemporary conservation efforts. Through activities ranging from logging concessions and the encouragement of cash crop production, the French colonial government directly caused massive forest loss. Restrictive protectionist conservation legislation failed to adequately protect forest reserves, instead prompting many Malagasy to use the forests as tools of resistance to colonial governance. Furthermore, Madagascar's convergent colonial and environmental history created a problematic association between colonialism and conservation that has persisted post-independence. I will address the formation of this association and its consequences for both the French colonial government and the international conservation effort.

Committee: Michael Fisher (Advisor) Subjects: History

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, Geography

This study used three Landsat images acquired in 1976, 1987, and 2002, and ISODATA unsupervised classifications to map and quantify landcover changes on Mt. Kenya between 1976 and 2002.There were 194,707 ha, 150,812 ha, and 140,085 ha of forest in 1976, 1987, and 2002, respectively. Among the change detection techniques evaluated, the multitemporal PCA technique had the highest accuracy (86.9%) and indicated a 10.3% loss in forest between 1987 and 2002. The post classification comparison technique also resulted in high classification accuracy (80.3%), but failed to capture adequately loss in the bamboo forest. Other change detection techniques evaluated including KT wetness, KT greenness and SARVI2 gave misleading results, as they appeared to capture differences in forest growth vigor rather than actual biomass changes. Landscape metrics computed for the forests indicated higher fragmentation rates in the 1976-1987 period compared to the 1987-2002 period.

Committee: John Maingi (Advisor) Subjects: Geography