Natural resources support all human productivity; their sustainable management is among the preeminent problems of the current century. Sustainability, and the implied professional responsibility, starts here.

The primary audiences for this book are scientists and engineers. They are among the people whose professional work directly engages natural resources, whether through harvesting, conversion, or conservation. Constructing a sustainable relationship between natural resources and the human activity they support is a problem that must be embraced by this group of professionals. Accordingly, we use their language – intrinsically scientific and mathematical. And we emphasize quantification and analysis as first principles.

The overall objective of this book is to bring together a unified presentation of natural resources. There are three generic elements:

• Dynamics of the resource in question

• Value of the resource and its uses

• Ownership and “control” of outcomes

or loosely in terms of disciplines: natural science, economics, and political science. Each of these must be blended in any resource analysis. They are the framework of sustainability.

There have been many approaches to this general problem, offering important theories and insights from individual disciplinary perspectives. Among them are harvesting, population structure and dynamics, ecology, land use and geography, economics, water, development, agriculture, forestry, and conservation. Each tradition speaks to a different audience and addresses distinct, specific resource issues, utilizing linear algebra, differential and difference equations, optimization, and computation as needed.