[...]... is and remains an essential player in the agricultural supply chain and in the rural area The differences between the agricultural sector and the rest of the industry are getting smaller and smaller Increasing farm sizes result in a more industrialized way of undertaking such operations Important ‘new’ characteristics of such bigger, industrialized farms include: importance of manufacturing processes... topics in each area, from the application point of view, as well as consideration of the operations research techniques involved In particular, we wished to highlight the successes of the OR approach to deal with problems, which involves a conceptual view of problems, modelling of complex realities, and development of algorithms for problems increasingly difficult to solve Issues of large scale, uncertainty,... or length of the planning horizon is very different Thus, we have almost a continuous renewal in the case of the fisheries, periodic cycles in the case of agriculture and forestry (ranging from some few months in the case of a horticultural crop to more than a century for some forest species), and enormous periods of time much beyond the human perception in the case of mining resources But in all the... type of systems in an efficient way The areas usually viewed within the natural resources field are: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, mining and water resources Even though, the above areas are usually viewed as separate fields of study, there are clear links and relations between them In fact, all of them share the common problem of allocating scarcity along time in an optimal manner The scale of time... Importance of Whole-Farm Risk Management in Agriculture 5 2.1 Types of Risk The current government policy has increasingly been aimed at creating an open market system This results in, amongst other things, the fact that agriculture in the Netherlands is increasingly confronted with price-making in international markets, such as the world market, which generally means lower and definitely more fluctuating... Moreover, modern intensive agriculture is threatening wild biodiversity Since agriculture is now spreading to the remotest parts of the world in destructive forms, wild biodiversity has been reducing, thus undermining the sustainability of the food production system (McNeely and Scherr, 2003) As a result, operations research for natural resource management has become important in assisting farmers and... appear increasingly in these decision processes Also, we view the integration in multidisciplinary approaches, where specialists in the specific areas need to interact with operations research specialist, and the need to incorporate information technologies for implementations is also present The set of papers compiled in this volume attempts to provide readers with significant OR/MS contributions in each... matter is to obtain an efficient use of the resource along its planning horizon Another element of connection among the different natural resources is due to the interaction between the use of the resource, and the environmental impact caused by its extraction or harvest This type of interaction implies additional complexities in the underlying decision-making process, making the use of OR/MS tools especially... contributions in each one of the applied areas previously defined In this way, we hope to encourage the use of quantitative techniques in order to manage the use of the different natural resources efficiently from an economic as well as an environmental point of view The papers are divided by area of application: agriculture, fisheries, forestry and mining Acknowledgments The preparation of the volume was... farm can anticipate changing conditions For example, by investing in multipurpose machines and buildings The second set of measures refers to sharing risks with others (Huirne et al., 1997; Hardaker et al., 2004) One possibility here is buying insurance At present, there are several types of insurance available, with which, by payment of a premium, risks can be reduced or even eliminated The farmer can . x0 y0 w1 h0" alt="" HANDBOOK OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH IN NATURAL RESOURCES Recent titles in the INTERNATIONAL SERIES IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH & MANAGEMENT. EXCELLENCE IN EMERGING ECONOMIES * A list of the early publications in the series is at the end of the book * HANDBOOK OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH IN NATURAL RESOURCES