Cost and User Profile of a Coastal Ocean Observing System

Fundamental to sustaining the financial support of a coastal ocean observing system is an intimate knowledge of users and their decision-making processes in order to maximize the worth of ocean observations to them. This article explores the evolving mission of GoMOOS (the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System), its costs of providing near real-time observations and observing products, possible methods to assess the benefits of an ocean observing system, and a method for indexing the importance—and thus, potentially, the economic value—that users attach to these observations and products.     

不确定性条件下的设备替换优化的 随机动态规划方法

本文提出了一种解决设备更新换代优化（ERO）问题的随机动态规划（SDP）模 型,用以明确地解释在车辆利用中的不确定性,并采用 Bellman 算法解决 ERO SDP 问题. 针对 SDP 状态空间的增长,提出了特殊简化算法,以解决动态规划方法中固有的“维数 灾”问题,确保所需的内存和计算时间不会随着时间范围的增加而成倍增长.并对 SDP 软 件的实现技术、功能和图形用户界面（GUI）进行了讨论,开发了基于 SDP 的 ERO 软件, 并使用美国得克萨斯交通局（TxDOT）现有车辆数据进行验证.对统计结果、软件计算时 间和求解效果进行综合分析,结果显示,使用该 ERO 软件,估计大量成本可以节省.     

Evaluating the feasibility of a passive travel survey collection in a complex urban environment: Lessons learned from the New York City case study

The combination of increasing challenges in administering household travel surveys and advances in global positioning systems (GPS)/geographic information systems (GIS) technologies motivated this project. It tests the feasibility of using a passive travel data collection methodology in a complex urban environment, by developing GIS algorithms to automatically detect travel modes and trip purposes. The study was conducted in New York City where the multi-dimensional challenges include urban canyon effects, an extreme dense and diverse set of land use patterns, and a complex transit network. Our study uses a multi-modal transportation network, a set of rules to achieve both complexity and flexibility for travel mode detection, and develops procedures and models for trip end clustering and trip purpose prediction. The study results are promising, reporting success rates ranging from 60% to 95%, suggesting that in the future, conventional self-reported travel surveys may be supplemented, or even replaced, by passive data collection methods.     

Conceptualizing Social Outcomes of Large Marine Protected Areas

There has been an assumption that because many large marine protected areas (LMPAs) are designated in areas with relatively few direct uses, they therefore have few stakeholders and negligible social outcomes. This article challenges this assumption with diverse examples of social outcomes that are distinctive in LMPAs. We define social outcomes as inclusive of both social change processes and social impacts, where “social” includes all perceptual or material human dimensions. We draw on five in-depth case studies to report social outcomes resulting from proposed or designated LMPAs in Bermuda, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Kiribati, Palau, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands & Guam. We conclude: (1) social outcomes arise even in remote LMPAs; (2) LMPA efforts generate social outcomes at all stages of development; (3) LMPAs have the potential to produce outcomes at a higher level of social organization, which can change the scope and type of affected populations and, in some cases, the nature and stakes of the outcomes themselves; (4) the potential for LMPAs to impart distinctive social outcomes results from their unique geographies and/or intersection with high-level politics and policy processes; and (5) social outcomes of LMPAs may emerge in the form of social change processes and/or social impacts.