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[R.B. Shepard]

RICHARD B. SHEPARD, PhD

Rich is the President and CEO of Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. He trained as a quantitative systems ecologist specializing in watersheds and the rivers that drain them. Rich provides extensive experience and knowledge to clients who want to be leaders in their industry. He was also the first private-sector consultant to be appointed to Oregon's Independent Multidisciplinary Science Team. This group provides scientific reviews of state agency efforts to rebuild Pacific salmon populations under the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds. Members of the IMST are appointed jointly by the Governor, Senate President, and Speaker of the House.

Prior to founding Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. in 1993, Rich worked for other consulting companies in Oregon and Florida, was a Technical Program Manager at the St. Johns River Water Management District, served as the Aquatic Ecologist for the Center for Biological Control of Mosquitoes at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and taught at universities in the US.

He has worked with leading natural resource companies to structure their planning and operations to work with the highly variable and extremely complex dynamics of natural ecosystems. His pragmatic, objective approach to environmentally responsible development and operation has gained him the respect and cooperation of regulatory and resource staff in state and federal agencies.

For years Rich shared the frustrations of industry and regulators over the subjectivity, uncertainty, time, and costs of environmental permitting. To resolve these concerns he developed a compliance approach based on the robust mathematics of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. This modern paradigm quantifies subjectivity inherent in concepts such as "significance", environmental conditions based on all important components, and local values and beliefs. This modern paradigm is fully explained in his book, Quantifying Environmental Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic published in 2005 by Springer-Verlag.

Before a client can achieve new levels of profitability, productivity or efficiency environmental concerns, regulations or statutes must be satisfied and conflicts must be resolved. Satisfying regulatory requirements and NGO (or other stakeholder) concerns almost always involves negotiation. Rich has mastered the principles and practices of win-win negotiating. The natural resource industries are engaged in long-term relationships with agency staff, NGOs, neighbors and other stakeholders. Win-win negotiating sets the stage for long-term productive and mutually-beneficial relationships among all parties. The return on investment (ROI) can exceed the current value of the organization.

KURT L. SUSSMAN

Kurt is the CTO of Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.. He has been designing, developing and testing software since 1978. In addition to creating custom applications for businesses, Kurt has participated in large team efforts that culminated in shipping award-winning products for multiple top-ten software publishers. His extensive experience includes embedded systems; he has programmed material-handling robots in a manufacturing environment, and written test plans for the built-in firmware in consumer products.

Having written consumer software, embedded software, custom software, and added his considerable expertise to the occasional hardware project, Kurt has a breadth of experience that is rare in the software field. He has learned many lessons about communication and process optimization that contribute to the success of his projects.

His successes are also based, to a large degree, on critical listening and asking pertinent questions. These skills are valuable in our approximate reasoning systems as they make the models reflect the underlying semantics of the uncertainties expressed by stakeholders.