Our single-item, GSRH questions demonstrated good reproducibility, reliability, and strong concurrent and discriminant scale performance with an established health status measure.

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We analyze the optimal harvesting problem for an ecosystem of species that experience environmental stochasticity. Our work generalizes the current literature significantly by taking into account non-linear interactions between species, state-dependent prices, and species injections. The key generalization is making it possible to not only harvest, but also 'seed' individuals into the ecosystem. This is motivated by how fisheries and certain endangered species are controlled. The harvesting problem becomes finding the optimal harvesting-seeding strategy that maximizes the expected total income from the harvest minus the lost income from the species injections. Our analysis shows that new phenomena emerge due to the possibility of species injections.It is well-known that multidimensional harvesting problems are very hard to tackle. We are able to make progress, by characterizing the value function as a viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. Moreover, we provide a verification theorem, which tells us that if a function has certain properties, then it will be the value function. This allows us to show heuristically, as was shown in Lungu and Øksendal (Bernoulli '01), that it is almost surely never optimal to harvest or seed from more than one population at a time.It is usually impossible to find closed-form solutions for the optimal harvesting-seeding strategy. In order to by-pass this obstacle we approximate the continuous-time systems by Markov chains. We show that the optimal harvesting-seeding strategies of the Markov chain approximations converge to the correct optimal harvesting strategy. This is used to provide numerical approximations to the optimal harvesting-seeding strategies and is a first step towards a full understanding of the intricacies of how one should harvest and seed interacting species. In particular, we look at three examples: one species modeled by a Verhulst-Pearl diffusion, two competing species and a two-species predator-prey system.

This work examines a class of switching jump diffusion processes. The main effort is devoted to proving the maximum principle and obtaining the Harnack inequalities. Compared with the diffusions and switching diffusions, the associated operators for switching jump diffusions are non-local, resulting in more difficulty in treating such systems. Our study is carried out by taking into consideration of the interplay of stochastic processes and the associated systems of integro-differential equations.

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In this paper, we consider a stochastic SIRS model with general incidence rate and perturbed by both white noise and color noise. We determine the threshold λ that is used to classify the extinction and permanence of the disease. In particular, λ < 0 implies that the disease-free (K, 0, 0) is globally asymptotic stable, i.e., the disease will eventually disappear. If λ > 0 the epidemic is strongly stochastically permanent. Our result is considered as a significant generalization and improvement over the results in [10,11,16,20,21].

This work develops asymptotic properties of a class of switching jump diffusion processes. The processes under consideration may be viewed as a number of jump diffusion processes modulated by a random switching mechanism. The underlying processes feature in the switching process depends on the jump diffusions. In this paper, conditions for recurrence and positive recurrence are derived. Ergodicity is examined in detail. Existence of invariant probability measures is proved.

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