Congratulations to Cassie Finer, Yukiko Hashida, and Roshan Adhikari, AEC graduate students who this year have successfully competed for external funding for their dissertation research.
Cassie Finer received the 2-year NOAA Fisheries Sea Grant Fellowship in Marine Resource Economics. Her project examines costs and benefits of restoring anadromous fish runs on the Oregon Coast, with an emphasis on understanding how estuary habitat restoration can alter 
coastal land markets. Removing dikes to restore tidal flows is a widely prescribed habitat restoration action in estuaries which will significantly alter the structure of the shoreline and consequently the use and value of adjacent land. Cassie’s work uses econometric models to quantify the effects of alternative shoreline amenities on the value of land, and then simulates the effects of changes in shoreline on the value of land. Her project will be the first to quantify the costs and benefits of estuary restoration programs on adjacent land markets. Cassie’s faculty advisor is David Lewis.
Yukiko Hashida received the 2-year USDA NIFA Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for her project quantifying the effects of climate change adaptation within forestry. Her project uses plot-level private forest management data along the west coast to model how landowners’ management decisions are influenced by markets, biophysical characteristics, and climatic factors.
She is developing an econometric analysis of forest management, and integrating the econometric model with a dynamic landscape simulation to quantify how climate change will influence the composition of west coast forests through adaptation decisions by private landowners. Yukiko’s project has multiple applications that examine the effects of carbon pricing on forest management, the effects of climate adaptation on forest wildlife species, and the long-term interaction between fire and forest management. Yukiko’s faculty advisor is David Lewis.
Roshan Adhikari received the Oregon Sylff Fellowships for International Research. The goal of the Sylff Program is to nurture future leaders who will transcend geopolitical, religious, ethnic, and cultural boundaries in the world community for the peace and the well-being of humankind.
Roshan’s research interests are sustainability of agricultural systems, including climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation in agriculture, and assessment of environmental and social impacts of agricultural technologies. In his dissertation, he aims to develop a conceptual framework for integrated assessment of agricultural and environmental policies, and methods for linking farm level models with national level models. The framework will be applied to the case of to evaluate the impacts of infrastructure and irrigation investment, and improved access to inputs such as fertilizers, on the poverty and food security status of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. Roshan’s faculty advisor is John Antle.