21 Chapter The sunflower family (Compositae or Asteraceae) is the largest family of flowering plants. Its many species occur around the world as annual and perennial herbs and as shrubs and trees (Chrysothamnus), and matchbrush (Gutierrezia)—make plants of this family among the most common and important plants of the Intermountain area (McArthur and others 1979a; table 1). Shrubs of these gener...

Look at a plant, and you’re probably also looking at a fungus. More than 80% of land plants partner with fungi to help those plants extract nutrients—nitrogen and phosphorus—from the ground (1, 2). The plants return the favor with carbon from their photosynthesis. Biologists suspect that this partnership was a major factor in allowing plants to move from water to land about 470 million years ag...

Non-destructive detection and evaluation of invisible cracks in metal structures is an important matter in several critical environments including ground transportation, air transportation and power plants. In this paper, a high-Q near-field Microwave probe is designed and fabricated using defected ground structures for surface and subsurface crack detection in metal structures. For this purpos...