Soil erosion is a key threat to many ecosystems, especially in subtropical China where high erosion rates occur. While the mechanisms that induce soil erosion on agricultural land are well understood, soil erosion processes in forests have rarely been studied. Throughfall kinetic energy (TKE) is influenced in manifold ways and often determined by the tree's leaf and architectural traits. We inv...

Apple flea weevil, Orchestes pallicornis (Say) was a sporadic pest in the early 1900s and has reemerged as a severe pest of cultivated apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) inMichigan. Organic apple orchards inMichigan have had outbreak population levels of apple flea weevil since 2008 and damage has resulted in up to 90% losses. Apple flea weevil is a small, 2–3-mm black weevil with enlarged high leg...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY A recent commentary by Edwards et al. (Am. J. Bot. 103: 975-978) proposed that constraints imposed by the packing of young leaves in buds could explain the positive association between non-entire leaf margins and latitude but did not thoroughly consider alternative explanations. METHODS We review the logic and evidence underlying six major hypotheses for the functional si...

To investigate possible roles of polar auxin transport in vein patterning, cotyledon and leaf vein patterns were compared for plants grown in medium containing polar auxin transport inhibitors (N-1-naphthylphthalamic acid, 9-hydroxyfluorene-9-carboxylic acid, and 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid) and in medium containing a less well-characterized inhibitor of auxin-mediated processes, 2-(p-chlorophyno...

We present work in progress towards maximum margin hierarchical classification where the objects are allowed to belong to more than one category at a time. The classification hierarchy is represented as a Markov network equipped with an exponential family defined on the edges. We present a variation of the maximum margin multilabel learning framework, suited to the hierarchical classification t...

Leaf margin characters are strong predictors of mean annual temperature (MAT) in modern plant communities and widely used tools for reconstructing paleoclimates from fossil floras. However, the frequency of nonentire-margined species may vary dramatically between different habitats of the same forest. In this paper we explore the potential for this habitat variation to introduce error into temp...

Two new species, representing the genus Aparatanais of the family Paratanaidae and the genus Tanais of the family Tanaidae (both families belonging to the suborder Tanaidomorpha), are described in the present study. The genus Aparatanais, the family Paratanaidae and the superfamily Paratanaoidea are recorded for the first time from Taiwan. Aparatanais lenoprimorum sp. nov. departs from its cong...

Among the genes controlling the differentiation and maintenance of epidermal cell fate are members of the HD-ZIP IV class family of plant-specific transcription factors, most of which are specifically expressed in the epidermis of tissues. Here, we report the functional analysis of the maize HD-ZIP IV gene OCL4 (outer cell layer 4) via the phenotypic analysis of two insertional mutants, and of ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Preservation of cultivar purity creates a particular challenge for plants that are self-incompatible, require insects for cross-pollination, and have easily germinating seeds and vigorously spreading rhizomes. As the fields must be planted with mixed populations, and a balance must be maintained between the cultivars to achieve effective pollination, methods for field monito...