Pollination of insect pollinated crops has been found to be correlated to pollinator abundance and diversity. Since organic farming has the potential to mitigate negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity, it may also benefit crop pollination, but direct evidence of this is scant. We evaluated the effect of organic farming on pollination of strawberry plants focusing on (1...

A new species of mealybug from Chile, Pseudococcus meridionalis Prado sp. n., is described and illustrated based on the morphological and molecular characterization of adult females. This species belongs to the “Pseudococcus maritimus” complex and displays a wide host plant range, including Japanese pear, persimmon, pomegranate, pear and grape.

The pear is an important temperate fruit worldwide that is produced by a group of species in the genus Pyrus. Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana Decne) is characterized by high resistance to multiple diseases, good adaptability, and high ornamental value, and is therefore widely planted in pear orchards for edible fruit production or as stock. Plant pathogens are a major threat to pear yield. Black...

The sugar transporter (ST) plays an important role in plant growth, development and fruit quality. In this study, a total of 75 ST genes were identified in the pear (Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd) genome based on systematic analysis. Furthermore, all ST genes identified were grouped into eight subfamilies according to conserved domains and phylogenetic analysis. Analysis of cis-regulatory element s...

Value estimates of ecosystem goods and services are useful to justify the allocation of resources towards conservation, but inconclusive estimates risk unsustainable resource allocations. Here we present replacement costs as a more accurate value estimate of insect pollination as an ecosystem service, although this method could also be applied to other services. The importance of insect pollina...

Different experiments have showed that interruption in pollination is an important problem in most almond orchards.Asmost of the almond cultivars are self-incompatible,pollination cannot be performed desirably and as a result a failure in almond yield is occurred.Thus under this circumstance,determination of selective cultivars compatibility and choosing appropriate pollinizers are so important...

A companion study showed that male pear psylla, Cacopsylla pyricola (Förster) (Homoptera: Psyllidae) were attracted to volatiles from pear shoots infested with post-diapause females. The present study compared the behavioral response of males to diapause and post-diapause females. Assays were done using a Y-tube olfactometer. We collected male and female winterform psylla from pear orchards at ...

Ten wild plants (cattail broad leaf shoots, chokecherries, beaked hazelnuts, lambsquarters, plains prickly pear, prairie turnips, stinging nettles, wild plums, raspberries, and rose hips) from three Native American reservations in North Dakota were analyzed to expand composition information of traditional foraged plants. Proximates, dietary fiber (DF), vitamins, minerals, carotenoids, and folat...

Another source of change is various deformations of an object that do not change its identity. If a dog gains weight, We study invariance to transformations having two components. The first is an arbitrary large affine transformation. This we still want to recognize it as the same dog. An even approximates a viewpoint change. The second is a small, but more widespread example is the boundary co...

We developed retrotransposon-based insertional polymorphism (RBIP) markers based on the long terminal repeat (LTR) sequences of copia-like retrotransposon Ppcrt4 and flanking genome sequences, which were derived from 454 sequencing data from Japanese pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) 'Hosui'. Out of 40 sequences including both LTR and flanking genome regions, we developed 22 RBIP markers and used them for...