The present study was undertaken to explore the possibility of using an indigenous strain of Pseudomonas fluorescens to manage one of the most devastating disease of the economically important brinjal crop, the bacterial wilt. The bacterial wilt caused by Ralstonia solanacearum has severly limited brinjal production in all parts of the world. In an attempt to evolve a biological management of t...

and deterministic processes regulate spatio-temporal variation in seed bank diversity" (2012). USDA Forest Service / UNL Faculty Publications. Paper 231. Abstract Question: Seed banks often serve as reservoirs of taxonomic and genetic diversity that buffer plant populations and influence post-disturbance vegetation trajectories; yet evaluating their importance requires understanding how their c...

Although adaptive plant population divergence across contrasting soil conditions is often driven by abiotic soil factors, natural enemies may also contribute. Cryptic matching to the native soil color is a form of defensive camouflage that seeds can use to avoid detection by seed predators. The legume Acmispon wrangelianus occurs across a variety of gray-green serpentine soils and brown nonserp...

The description of main biological, ecological and functional attributes of a native earthworm species in a natural savanna and several introduced pastures from the Eastern Plains of Colombia was the main objective in this study. To achieve this a set of different experiments and explicit field work were designed and carried out at the Carimagua Research Station, 320 km east from Villavicencio ...

Substrate type is a key-factor in nest-site selection and nest architecture of burrowing birds. However, little is known about which factors drive nest-site selection for these species, especially in the tropics. We studied the influence of soil attributes on nest-site selection by the campo miner Geositta poeciloptera, an open grassland bird that builds its nests within soil cavities. For all ...

Mastication is a forest fuel thinning treatment that involves chipping or shredding small trees and shrubs and depositing the material across the forest floor. By decreasing forest density mastication has been shown to lessen crown fire hazard, yet other impacts have only recently started to be studied. Our study evaluates how mastication treatments alter the density and composition of soil see...

Reforestation after a landslide facilitates competition between herbaceous plants and arborous plants. Tangible variations in grassland areas in regions susceptible to landslides can only be found within collections of trees. A landslide area in the Sule Watershed was investigated. Relative illuminance results reveal that the Rhodes grass (Chloris gayana Kunth) biomass in this landslide area in...

Seed priming is a physiological seed enhancement method. Hydroor osmotic priming can advance germination under adequate moisture conditions. During direct seeding on well-drained paddy and upland fields, rice seeds occasionally encounter low soil moisture conditions. Under these conditions, rice seeds need to undergo rapid germination and secure emergence through improved water absorption capac...

Seed dormancy cycling plays a crucial role in the lifecycle timing of many plants. Little is known of how the seeds respond to the soil seed bank environment following dispersal in spring into the short-term seed bank before seedling emergence in autumn. Seeds of the winter annual Arabidopsis ecotype Cvi were buried in field soils in spring and recovered monthly until autumn and their molecular...

The assumption that seeds imbibe most of the water required for germination as liquid through seed-to-soil contact has been a dominant theme in germination research and seeding technology. Under most conditions, seeds are also exposed to water vapour during imbibition, but the relative contributions of liquid and vapour are difficult to assess. In water uptake models that include vapour, proced...