Two tributary streams (Fourmile branch and Pen branch) located on the US Department of Energy’s Savannah river site in west-central South Carolina, USA received thermal discharges from nuclear production reactors for over 30 years. Effluent releases produced stream water temperatures of over 50°C and stream flows of ten times above their base level. Consequently, existing plant and animal commu...

Many systems for field-based, high-throughput phenotyping (FB-HTP) quantify and characterize the reflected radiation from the crop canopy to derive phenotypes, as well as infer plant function and health status. However, given the technology's nascent status, it remains unknown how biophysical and physiological properties of the plant canopy impact downstream interpretation and application of ca...

The partitioning of light is very difficult to assess, especially in discontinuous or irregular canopies. The aim of the present study was to analyze the spatial distribution of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) in a heterogeneous cotton canopy based on a geo-statistical sampling method. Field experiments were conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Anyang, Henan, China. Field plots were arranged...

Ferula pseudalliacea (Bitter asafetida) is an endemic medicinal plant grown in the center of Iran, which is used in pharmaceutical industries. There is less report about its habitat characteristics and distribution in Iran. So, this research was conducted to study the effects of topography and soil properties on distribution of this species in Yazd Province, Iran in 2016 and 2017. Two habitats ...

The soil or background spectra contribution to grass canopy spectral reflectance for the 0.35 to 0.80 fJ-m region was investigated using in situ collected spectral reflectance data. Regression analysis was used to estimate accurately the unexposed soil spectral reflectance and to quantify maxima and minima for soil-green vegetation reflection contrasts. generally be impractical to take detailed...

0378-1127/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2012.07.009 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 864 656 4864; fax E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Geoff Wa Throughout the southeastern United States, land managers are currently interested in converting loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) plantations to species rich longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) ecosystem...

Ecosystem models have difficulty predicting plant drought responses, partially from uncertainty in the stomatal response to water deficits in soil and atmosphere. We evaluate a 'supply-demand' theory for water-limited stomatal behavior that avoids the typical scaffold of empirical response functions. The premise is that canopy water demand is regulated in proportion to threat to supply posed by...

Understanding plant photosynthesis, or Gross Primary Production (GPP), is a crucial aspect of quantifying the terrestrial carbon cycle. Remote sensing approaches, in particular multi-angular spectroscopy, have proven successful for studying relationships between canopy-reflectance and plant-physiology processes, thus providing a mechanism to scale up. However, many different instrumentation des...

Plant diseases and pests can affect a wide range of commercial crops, and result in a significant yield loss. It is reported that at least 10% of global food production is lost due to plant diseases (Christou and Twyman, 2004; Strange and Scott, 2005). Excessive pesticides are used for protecting crops from diseases and pests. This not only increases the cost of production, but also raises the ...

One of the main factors affecting vegetation productivity is absorbed light, which is largely governed by chlorophyll. In this paper, we introduce the concept of chlorophyll efficiency, representing the amount of gross primary production per unit of canopy chlorophyll content (Chl) and incident PAR. We analyzed chlorophyll efficiency in two contrasting crops (soybean and maize). Given that they...