Expanding human population and economic growth have lead to large-scale conversion of natural habitat to human-dominated landscapes with consequent large-scale declines in biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity, while at the same time meeting expanding human needs, is an issue of utmost importance. In this paper we develop a spatially explicit landscape-level model for analyzing the biological and economic consequences of alternative land-use patterns. The spatially-explicit biological model incorporates habitat preferences, area requirements and dispersal ability between habitat patches for terrestrial vertebrate species to predict the likely number of species that will be sustained on the landscape. The spatially explicit economic model incorporates site characteristics and location to predict economic returns in a variety of potential land uses. We use the model to search for efficient land-use patterns that maximize biodiversity conservation objectives for a given level of economic returns, and vice-versa. We apply the model to the Willamette Basin, Oregon, USA. By thinking carefully about the arrangement of activities, we find land-use patterns that sustain high biodiversity and economic returns. Compared to the current land-use pattern, we show that both biodiversity conservation and the value of economic activity could be increased substantially.
The advent of the wide variety of nm, highly integrated, advanced manufacturing technologies available for acquisition by a firm's managers has brought to light an accompanying set of unexpected issues. These issues include expectations for the benefits and costs of these technologies, determining the appropriate order of implementation and finding a way to justify acquisition when many of the benefits are a function of the technology's learning and synergistic effects on other operations and technologies. W present here a model that captures the interaction effects of these highly integrated technologies and discuss the data requirements for application of the construct. We then illustrate the model's workings with a number of multitechnology examples and show the danger of ignoring the synergistic and learning effects of these technologies when considering their acquisition.Subject A m w Gunputu A p p M o m , L a m h g Modds, and hdu&n/@autions Management BACKGROUND
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