Mathematical models based on dynamic growth process of greenhouse melon leaves were built. Two experiments, involving different years, organic fertilizer rates and cultivar types in melon, were carried out for data acquisition. In each experiment, time-course observations of leaf morphological properties (leaf length and leaf width) on different leaf positions of melon were obtained. The result...

This study compared leaf gas exchange, leaf hydraulic conductance, twig hydraulic conductivity and leaf osmotic potential at full turgor between two drought-deciduous trees, Vitex peduncularis Wall. and Xylia xylocarpa (Roxb.) W. Theob., and two evergreen trees, Hopea ferrea Lanessan and Syzygium cumini (L.) Skeels, at the uppermost canopies in tropical dry forests in Thailand. The aims were to...

Leaf development in higher plants requires the specification of leaf initials at the flanks of a pluripotent structure termed the shoot apical meristem. In Arabidopsis, this process is facilitated by negative interactions between class I KNOTTED1-like homeobox (KNOX) and ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1 (AS1) transcription factors, such that KNOX proteins are confined to the meristem and AS1 to leaf initials...

Leaves are most vulnerable to herbivory during expansion. We hypothesised that one factor favouring small leaves could be that smaller-leaved species have shorter expansion times and are therefore exposed to high levels of herbivory for a shorter period than large leaves. In order to test this hypothesis, leaf expansion time and leaf area loss were measured for 51 species from Sydney, Australia...

Automatic species identification has many advantages over traditional species identification. Currently, most plant automatic identification methods focus on the features of leaf shape, venation and texture, which are promising for the identification of some plant species. However, leaf tooth, a feature commonly used in traditional species identification, is ignored. In this paper, a novel auto...

Research on the effects of declining abundances of the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) in Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries has primarily focused on the role of oysters in filtration and nutrient dynamics, and as habitat for fish or fish prey. Oysters also play a key role in providing substrate for the overwintering polyp stage of the scyphomedusa sea nettle, Chrysaora quinquecirrha, wh...

Concentrations of NO2 and O3 were measured inside and outside a dense broad-leaved forest canopy adjacent to a busy traffic route in the City of Gothenburg, Sweden, with duplicate passive diffusion samplers during six one-week periods starting well before leaf senescence and ending when leaves were largely senescent. Concentrations of NO2 were lower inside the forest canopy during all periods (...

We introduce the notion of a matron M = {Mn,m} whose submodules M∗,1 and M1,∗ are non-Σ operads. We construct a functor from PROP to matrons and its inverse, the universal enveloping functor. We define the free matron H∞, generated by a singleton in each bidegree (m, n) 6= (1, 1), and define an A∞-bialgebra as an algebra over H∞. We realize H∞ as the cellular chains of polytopes {KKn,m = KKm,n}...