In this seminar, Alexandru Hening (Texas A&M University) and Sergiu Ungureanu (St George’s, University of London) present their work on harvesting problems. Framing harvesting as an ergodic control problem, Alexandru shows how to maximise the asymptotic harvesting yield of a population in a stochastic environment whose dynamics is described by a one dimensional diffusion. The optimal strategy has a bang-bang property: there exists a threshold such that whenever the population is under the threshold the harvesting rate must be zero, whereas when the population is above the threshold the harvesting rate must be at the upper limit. Sergiu discusses the relation between the optimal harvesting strategies and one that maximises the expected cumulative present value of the harvesting yield.
Very interesting webinar, especially given the interconnections between biodiversity and climate adaptation.