Many fruit trees undergo cycles of heavy fruit load (ON-Crop) in one year, followed by low fruit load (OFF-Crop) the following year, a phenomenon known as alternate bearing (AB). The mechanism by which fruit load affects flowering induction during the following year (return bloom) is still unclear. Although not proven, it is commonly accepted that the fruit or an organ which senses fruit presen...

The domestication of the tomato Solanum lycopersicum and associated selective pressures eventually led to the large-fruited varieties cultivated today. S. lycopersicum varieties are generally red-fruited, but display considerable variance in fruit colour intensity, shape, and quality. The increase in productivity on cultivation is, however, somewhat offset by the narrowing of the crops genetic ...

Andromonoecy is hypothesized to evolve as a mechanism enabling plants to independently allocate resources to female and male function. If staminate flower production is a mechanism to regulate allocation to female function (i.e., fruit production), then large-fruited species should be more strongly andromonoecious than smaller-fruited taxa because more resources are required to mature large fru...

The effect of gravity and sliding friction on the dynamics around targeted energy transfer an inclined vibro-impact nonlinear sink (VINES) is addressed. non-smooth first formulated in Signorini’s contact law treated using a Moreau-Jean scheme adapted with energy-conserving integration method. Exhaustive discussions are then carried out regarding vibration damping performance VINES, as well thei...

We compared post-agricultural succession across the range of farming activities practiced in Guatemala’s northern lowlands: agroforestry, swidden, ranching, and input-intensive monocultures. At 10 sites over 13 to 40 months we assessed the following characteristics of trees and shrubs that were 1 cm diameter at breast height: height, basal-area accumulation, recruitment of all individuals and f...

Alien plants are a growing threat to the Galápagos unique biota. We evaluated the impact of alien plants on eight seed dispersal networks from two islands of the archipelago. Nearly 10 000 intact seeds from 58 species were recovered from the droppings of 18 bird and reptile dispersers. The most dispersed invaders were Lantana camara, Rubus niveus and Psidium guajava, the latter two likely benef...

A method of representing transformations of a finite set pictorially is described. These pictures of a function are used to count certain idempotent transformations, and interesting formulae for the Fibonacci numbers are obtained. No part of any string extends beyond the region ° : : ; z ::; 1, and if two strings intersect then they join together, from the point of intersection, to meet the sam...

Alternaria leaf blight is a much greater threat to muskmelons than watermelons. The disease is caused by a fungus (Alternaria cucumerina) that can rapidly defoliate plants, causing reductions in bulk yield. Melons on defoliated vines ripen prematurely and result in lower quality fruit compared to melons produced on healthy vines. Yield losses greater than 50% will occur in situations where the ...

The aim of this paper is to propose a novel approach to integrate financial information, incorporating the dependence structure among the variables. The approach is based on two types of graphical models: vines and non parametric Bayesian belief nets (NPBBNs). Vines are undirected graphs, representing pair copula constructions, which are used to model the dependence structure of a set of variab...

As the ancestor of cultivated grape, Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris represents a unique, invaluable genetic resource for the improvement of cultivated grapevines. Recently, five populations of wild grapevines were identified in Portugal. Sixty vines were characterized with 11 nuclear SSR markers and further compared with 70 genotypes of Portuguese Vitis vinifera subsp. sativa. The obtained da...