The initiation of flowering is a critical life-history trait; plants have presumably evolved to flower at a time of year that ensures maximal reproductive success in a given region. Decades of physiological studies have revealed that flowering is initiated in response to both environmental cues and endogenous pathways. Commonly studied environmental cues include changes in temperature and dayle...

Flowering locus C (FLC) is a major regulator of flowering responses to seasonal environmental factors. Here, we document that FLC also regulates another major life-history transition-seed germination, and that natural variation at the FLC locus and in FLC expression is associated with natural variation in temperature-dependent germination. FLC-mediated germination acts through additional genes ...

In this paper we show the seasonal and diurnal variation in the content of the four iridoids found in cultivars of Antirrhinum majus, antirrhinoside, antirrhide, 5-glucosyl-antirrhinoside and linarioside. The seasonal variation in total iridoid content showed a marked bimodal distribution with high total values (around 100mg/g dry matter) early and late in the season and a very low content of a...

Acknowledgements: This document should be seen as a revised version of the one produced in 2000 in the context of the construction of the 2000 Ghana Poverty Profile. The revisions mainly consist of the inclusion of GLSS 5-specific issues as well as an update of the different statistical tables. Those revisions were done by Harold Coulombe. The authors are grateful to Dr Grace Bediako (GSS), Dr ...

The influence of bulb maturity at bulb harvest on growth and flowering response of Ornithogalum thyrsoides Jacq. ‘Chesapeake Starlight’ was investigated. Experiments were designed to determine if bulb maturity can be induced by bulb storage temperatures and whether bulb maturity can be evaluated by flowering responses. Bulbs with all senesced leaves at harvest were considered ‘‘mature’’ or with...

Due to concerns over negative impacts on insect pollinators, the European Union has implemented a moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticide seed dressings for mass-flowering crops. We assessed the effectiveness of this policy in reducing the exposure risk to honeybees by collecting 130 samples of honey from bee keepers across the UK before (2014: N = 21) and after the moratorium wa...

Plants of two varieties of soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) and two varieties of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) were grown in controlled environments and subjected to water stress at various stages of growth. Leaf resistances and leaf water potentials were measured as stress developed. In soybeans the upper leaf surface had a higher resistance than the lower surface at all leaf water potentia...

It is easy to live for the day. All lazybones do that and legitimately those who have finally taken a rest and enjoy in a relaxed way what is offered to them. The more eventful the better since then it is easy to forget what happened before and since unconnected impressions can be grasped in a particularly fresh way, in a virtually raw way. And in the same way as one might live for the moment, ...

As the name indicates, a renewal process is one that “renews” itself regularly. That is, there is a sequence of times {Tn, n ∈ Z} such that the process after time Tn is independent of what happened before that time and has a distribution that does not depend on n. We have seen examples of such processes before. As a simple example, one could consider a Poisson process with jump times Tn. As ano...