Two alternative designs to the ensemble classifier proposed in [13] are studied in this report. First, the out-of-bag error estimation is replaced with crossvalidation. Second, we incorporate AdaBoost and modify the weights of the individual training samples as the training progresses. The final decision is formed as a weighted combination of individual predictions rather than through majority ...

Animal seed dispersal provides an important ecosystem service by strongly benefiting plant communities. There are several theoretical studies on the ecology of plant-animal seed-disperser interactions, but few studies have explored the evolution of this mutualism. Moreover, these studies ignore plant life history and frugivore foraging behaviour. Thus, it remains an open question what the condi...

Pectate lyase genes have been documented as excellent candidates for improvement of fruit firmness. However, implementation of pectate lyase in regulating fruit postharvest deterioration has not been fully explored. In this report, 22 individual pectate lyase genes in tomato were identified, and one pectate lyase gene SlPL (Solyc03g111690) showed dominant expression during fruit maturation. RNA...

Fruit wastes of apple (Malus pumila), banana (Musa paradisiaca), papaya (Carica papaya), pomegranate (Punica granatum) and sweet orange (Citrus sinesis) @ 20g/plant and the fungal biocontrol agent Paecilomyces lilacinus @ 2g (mycelium+spores)/plant, alone and in combination were evaluated for the management of reniform nematode, Rotylenchulus reniformis infecting chickpea under glasshouse condi...

Multi-instance (MI) learning is a variant of supervised machine learning, where each learning example contains a bag of instances instead of just a single feature vector. MI learning has applications in areas such as drug activity prediction, fruit disease management and image classification. This thesis investigates the case where each instance has a weight value determining the level of influ...

Flowering plant density can increase number of visits and fruit set in multi-flowering plants, however this aspect has not been studied on few flower species. We studied the effects of individual floral display and plant density on the fruit production of the epiphytic, moth-pollinated orchid, Ryncholaelia glauca, in an oak forest of Chavarrillo, Veracruz, Mexico. Species is non-autogamous, and...

In this study we compare the reproductive biology of Cordia globosa and C. leucocephala (Cordiaceae, Boraginales; formerly referred to Boraginaceae) to understand the functioning of the floral morphs and the relations with their effective pollinators. The species are synchronopatric, distylic, and self-incompatible. Though they share melittophilous traits, the main visitor and pollinator of C. ...