Availability of less-healthy packaged food and beverage products has been implicated as an important driver of obesity and diet-related disease. An increasing number of packaged foods and beverages are sold in India. Our objective was to evaluate the healthiness of packaged foods sold by India's largest manufacturers. Healthiness was assessed using the Australian Health Star Rating (HSR) system...

The past was a world of giants, with abundant whales in the sea and large animals roaming the land. However, that world came to an end following massive late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions on land and widespread population reductions in great whale populations over the past few centuries. These losses are likely to have had important consequences for broad-scale nutrient cycling, because rece...

In this paper, we derive and analyze a mathematical model for the interactions between phytoplankton and zooplankton in a periodic environment, in which the growth rate and the intrinsic carrying-capacity of phytoplankton are changing with respect to time and nutrient concentration. A threshold value: "Predator's average growth rate" is introduced and it is proved that the phytoplankton-zooplan...

Grapes and grape-derived products have worldwide importance due to its consumption by human, however, they may also be used for ruminant feeding when their price or quality is low. The objectives of current study were to determine the nutritive value, in terms of chemical composition, in vitro rumen gas production kinetics and predicted nutrient supply, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopic ...

Rapid environmental change at high latitudes is predicted to greatly alter the diversity, structure, and function of plant communities, resulting in changes in the pools and fluxes of nutrients. In Arctic tundra, increased nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) availability accompanying warming is known to impact plant diversity and ecosystem function; however, to date, most studies examining Arctic n...

During the twentieth century, agricultural production strived to achieve increased food production in order to satisfy both local and export demands. In many cases, this led to increased farm sizes and an operational separation of crop and livestock production. Society fears that the trend of increasing centralization and industrialization of agriculture, specifically animal agriculture, has re...

Nutritional constraints often restrict yields of crops in farmers’ fields. Plant nutrient status is currently diagnosed using empirically derived nutrient norms from arbitrarily defined high and low yielding subpopulations above a quantitative yield target. Generic models can assist Compositional Nutrient Diagnosis (CND) in providing a yield cutoff value between high-and lowyielding subpopulati...

Understory vegetation plays a crucial role in carbon and nutrient cycling in forest ecosystems; however, it is not clear how understory species affect tree litter decomposition and nutrient dynamics. In this study, we examined the impacts of understory litter on the decomposition and nutrient release of tree litter both in a pine (Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica) and a poplar (Populus × xiaozhu...