The capability to monitor water status from crops on a regular basis can enhance productivity and water use efficiency. In this paper, high-resolution thermal imagery acquired by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was used to map plant water stress and its spatial variability, including sectors under full irrigation and deficit irrigation over nectarine and peach orchards at 6.12 cm ground sample...

Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree, is an important crop species that accounts for the majority of natural latex production. The rubber tree nuclear genome consists of 18 chromosomes and is roughly 2.15 Gb. The current rubber tree reference genome assembly consists of 1,150,326 scaffolds ranging from 200 to 531,465 bp and totalling 1.1 Gb. Only 143 scaffolds, totalling 7.6 Mb, have been placed ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The distribution of canopy growth among different shoot types such as epicormic, long and short shoots is not well understood in the peach tree. In this experiment, the effects of crop load and early epicormic sprout removal on current and subsequent-year distribution of vegetative growth among epicormic, long and short shoots was investigated in Prunus persica. METHODS Fi...

Glyphosate is a nonselective foliar-applied herbicide that has been used for over 20 years for the management of annual, perennial, and biennial herbaceous species of grasses, sedges, and broadleaf weeds, as well as woody brush and tree species (Bradshaw et al. 1997). Commercialization of engineered glyphosate resistance in several crop species has further expanded the in-crop use of the herbic...

The use of genetically engineered crop plants has raised concerns about the risks these crops pose to natural and agricultural ecosystems. The potential environmental hazards of transgenic woody biomass crops is discussed, and based on the biology of these crops and their transgenes, recommend a scientific framework for assessing risk. The potential impacts of transgenes based on both character...

The responsibility for protecting U.S. agriculture from pests and diseases is assigned by the Federal Plant Pest Act (FPPA) to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the Department of Agriculture. The Plant Protection Act (Title 7 U.S.C. Sections 7701 et seq.) gives Aphis statutory authority over genetically modified organisms (GMO), in effect assigning to APHIS a related res...

Glufosinate is currently used to kill unwanted plants in landscape areas where a complete vegetation kill is desired (for example, around the base of shrubs, in sand traps on golf courses, or around fence and sign posts) in industrial, recreational, and public areas such as airports, schools, parking lots, roadsides, and railroad rights-ofway. It is also used as a directed spray (away from crop...

Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops (CASC) is a four-year project to develop crop intelligence and agricultural automation technologies for the apple and nursery tree industries. Supported by the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative, CASC aims at impacting industry where it matters most: increasing production efficiency and reducing labor costs. In this paper we present our most rec...

The models developed for simulating olive tree and grapevine yields were reviewed by focussing on the major limitations of these models for their application in a changing climate. Empirical models, which exploit the statistical relationship between climate and yield, and process based models, where crop behaviour is defined by a range of relationships describing the main plant processes, were ...

Crop maintenance is one of the crucial factors that determine the quantity and quality of the agricultural products. Protecting crops from plant diseases is an important aspect that increases the profit of the farmer. This study aims at developing a computational model that will facilitate crop production by accurately identifying diseases that affect productivity of turmeric plants. The turmer...