In competition-dominated communities, traits promoting resource conservation and competitive ability are expected to have an important influence on species relative abundance (SRA). Yet, few studies have tested the trait-abundance relations in the line of species trade-off in resource conservation versus acquisition, indicating by multiple traits coordination. We measured SRA and key functional...

Awareness of resource consumption in the home is a key part of reducing our ecological footprint yet lack of appropriate understanding and motivation often deters residents from behaviour change. The coming deployment of smart metering technologies, the increasing practicality of embedded devices, and the widespread use of Internet and mobile tools offer new opportunities for “greener” resident...

This paper addresses the problem of providing transactional support for improved data consistency in mobile file access, while paying careful attention to the resource constraints of mobile clients. We present data on resource consumption from an implementation of the isolation-only transaction (IOT) mechanism of the Coda File System. The data shows that the resource conservation techniques use...

Is ecotourism merely a novel ‘saleable’ label for what travelers and their agents have been doing all along? Or is it “a new alternative for sharing cultures and ecosystems based on. . noble objectives” [18]? As an arena in which “corporate tenets and conservationist ideals are interwoven’ [47], ecotourism may continue to elude concrete definition. However, analysis of the benefits and costs of...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...

In 1971, I spent five months in Ghana, West Africa, collecting data for an MSc thesis, "On the Ecology and Fishery of a Small West African Lagoon". I was puzzled at the time by the behavior of the fishermen who exploited the Sakumo lagoon, near Tema (Fig. 1). Based in a nearby village, they were part-timers or full-timers, but fished in either case rarely more than about 4 hours at a time, then...

This article develops a framework to analyze the impacts on resource development of efficient management practices that account for possible resource conserving technological changes. Compared with the traditional management practice ignoring these changes, efficient management may not delay or reduce resource development, depending on the level of the changes. Under efficient management, a hig...

The nexus of advocacy and science has been a recurring discussion theme since the earliest days of the Society for Conservation Biology. When Michael Soulé defined conservation as a “mission-oriented discipline,” he succinctly captured the issue. He and others have asked whether biologists on a mission to save ecosystems, ecological communities, species, and populations can provide the value-fr...

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country’s relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare subject to being implementable by Perfect Bayesian equilibria. With complete information, the optimal q...