Carotenoids produce the brilliant red, orange, and yellow colors of many animals. However, melanin pigments can also confer some of these same hues. Because carotenoid and melanin colors are produced in different ways and may serve different signaling functions, either within or between species, it is important to establish whether one or both types of pigment are responsible for coloration. We...

Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot threatened by habitat loss, which is detrimental to the future survival of forest-dwelling herpetofauna. For conservation purposes, it is essential to determine how species respond to different types of anthropogenic habitat alteration. We conducted standardized field surveys (a variation of visual encounter survey) to assess species richness, abundance and ...

Orchard workers in north China are highly exposed to orchard pollens, especially peach and other Rosaceae family pollens during pollination season. The aim of this study was to investigate whether occupational allergy to peach tree pollen as a member of Rosaceae family is IgE-mediated and to evaluate the cross-reactivity among Rosaceae family pollens. Allergen skin test and conjunctival challen...

Achieving a low cost robotic arm is crucial in agricultural applications. Task based optimization of the robot kinematics influence the robot simplicity and cost. Nevertheless, the environment of the robot also has a major influence on its simplicity. We have simulated a variety of orchard architectures and searched for an optimal robot design for each architecture. From the training systems wh...

Information gathering and processing in horticulture helps optimise control processes and can enable more precise farm management. Robotics and automation are helping make high resolution, timely, farm wide measurements for tasks such as yield estimation, crop health and soil analysis. An efficient means of storing and processing such information is to discretise it to individual trees. To auto...

The blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria (Say), is a solitary bee that is an excellent pollinator of tree fruit orchards. Due to the annual rising costs of honey bee hive rentals, many orchardists are eager to develop management tools and practices to support O. lignaria as an alternative pollinator. Establishing O. lignaria pollination as a sustainable industry requires careful consideration of bo...

Soil-water characteristic curves were determined for Krome calcareous very gravelly loam soil in the laboratory and in situ in an orchard. In the laboratory, soil-water retention was determined with a pressure plate and pressure Tempe cells for soil collected from vegetable fields. In the orchard, soil-water suction measured with tensiometers was compared to volumetric soil-water content (E) de...

This paper describes an Expert System for apple orchard integrated control. The system consists of two parts. In the rst one, help to the agricultural producer is provided in classifying the producer observations. In the second part an interactive abductive module suggests explanations of those observations. Classi cation has been implemented with the aid of discrimination net techniques. The a...