Stay-green sorghum plants exhibit greener leaves and stems during the grain-filling period under water-limited conditions compared with their senescent counterparts, resulting in increased grain yield, grain mass, and lodging resistance. Stay-green has been mapped to a number of key chromosomal regions, including Stg1, Stg2, Stg3, and Stg4, but the functions of these individual quantitative tra...

Forest canopy moisture content is an important factor in determining forest fire risk and forest fire behaviour. In Dargon 2 project, to develop a suitable regional early warning technique to predict forest fire risk, a Normal Difference Water Index (NDWI), which has been calculated by using the reflectance of SWIR and NIR band of HJ-1B IRS, has been used to retrieve forest canopy moisture cont...

Plant growth and productivity are strongly affected by limited water availability in drought prone environments. The current climate change scenario, characterized by long periods without precipitations followed by short but intense rainfall, forces plants to implement different strategies to cope with drought stress. Understanding how plants use water during periods of limited water availabili...

Although extremely vulnerable to coastal eutrophication, seagrasses represent important structuring elements and sources of primary production in shallow waters. They also generate an optical signature that can be tracked remotely. Accurate knowledge of light absorption and scattering by submerged plant canopies permits the calculation of important plantand ecosystem-level properties, including...

Estimation of vegetation water content (VWC) by optical remote sensing improves soil moisture retrievals from passive microwave radiometry. For a variety of vegetation types, the largest unknown for predicting VWC is stem water content, which is assumed to be allometrically related to the water content of the plant canopy. For maize and soybean, measured stem water contents were highly correlat...

MUNISHI, P. K. T. & SHEAR, T. H. 2005. RainfaU interception and partitioning in afromontane rain forests of the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania: implications for water conservation. The aboveground components of the hydrologic cycle of rain forest are important processes that determine the hydrologic hehavioiir and dynamics of these ecosystems. Precipitation, throughfall, stem flow, canopy inte...

The land surface phenology (LSP) start of season (SOS) metric signals the seasonal onset of vegetation activity, including canopy growth and associated increases in land-atmosphere water, energy and carbon (CO2) exchanges influencing weather and climate variability. The vegetation optical depth (VOD) parameter determined from satellite passive microwave remote sensing provides for global LSP mo...

Forests are complex ecosystems that develop over centuries through the interactions between organisms and biogeochemical cycles of elements occurring in the soil-atmosphere continuum. The biomass and structure of a forest stand is involved in several ecosystem processes and has been used as an indicator of forest health and productivity. The forest biomass is a key component of the carbon cycle...

The temporal variability of interception losses was measured for contrasting forest communities in the southeastern United States. Throughfall was measured simultaneously at Fort Benning in western Georgia for the five forest communities that are characteristic of the region. The measured interception losses over the study period were 22.3, 18.6, 17.7, 17.6, and 17.4% of the total precipitation...

Knowledge on gene action and trait expression are important for effective breeding. The objective of this study was to determine the general combining ability (GCA), specific combining ability (SCA), maternal effects and heritability of drought tolerance, yield and yield components of candidate sweetpotato clones. Twelve genotypes selected for their high yield, dry matter content or drought tol...