We conducted a spatial analysis of low pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza (AI) outbreaks, that affected 41 chicken farms in Japan in 2005. A statistically significant (p=0.001) cluster of AI-positive farms was identified in the central part of Ibaraki Prefecture. Inside the AI cluster, the density was high for both chicken farms and chicken population, the proportion of layer finisher type farms w...

Recent advancements in photovoltaic (PV) system technologies have decreased their investment cost and enabled the construction of large PV farms for bulk power generations. The output power of PV farms is aaected by both failure of composed components and solar radiation variability. These two factors cause the output power of PV farms be random and diierent from that of conventional units. The...

Recent declines in managed honey bee, Apis mellifera L., colonies have increased interest in the current and potential contribution of wild bee populations to the pollination of agricultural crops. Because wild bees often live in agricultural fields, their population density and contribution to crop pollination may be influenced by farming practices, especially those used to reduce the populati...

The Web is a very large social network. It is important and interesting to understand the “ecology” of the Web: the general relations of Web pages to their environment. The understanding of such relations has a few important applications, including Web community identification and analysis, and Web spam detection. In this paper, we propose the notion of page farm, which is the set of pages cont...

Parasitic salmon lice are potentially harmful to salmonid hosts and farm produced lice pose a threat to wild salmonids. To control salmon lice infections in Norwegian salmonid farming, numbers of lice are regularly counted and lice abundance is reported from all salmonid farms every month. We have developed a stochastic space-time model where monthly lice abundance is modelled simultaneously fo...

The control of highly infectious diseases of livestock such as classical swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and avian influenza is fraught with ethical, economic, and public health dilemmas. Attempts to control outbreaks of these pathogens rely on massive culling of infected farms, and farms deemed to be at risk of infection. Conventional approaches usually involve the preventive culling of a...

in order to study the effect of spraying of abscisic acid on yield and yield components of chickpea (cicer arietinum l.) under rainfed and supplementary irrigation, a field experiment was conducted in 2010 in agricultural research station of ilam university. a split factorial experiment based on a randomized complete block design was conducted. main plots were composed of two levels of irrigati...

Effects of seed rates on grain, straw and oil yield of safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) were studied for two years in the semi-arid central Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. Three trials, two under rainfed and one under supplementary irrigations, were conducted using seed rates of 6, 12, 24 and 48 kg ha -1 corresponding to intra-row spacing of 20, 10, 5, and 2.5 cm, respectively. There was significan...

Nitrous oxide is an important greenhouse gas and contributes to stratospheric ozone destruction, but still little is known about emissions of this trace gas from soils in semiarid environments and how emissions are affected by irrigation. Therefore, nitrous oxide emissions from a runoff-irrigated and rainfed endosodi-calcaric Fluvisol in the semiarid northwest of Kenya were measured using the c...

A river flow regime describes an average seasonal behaviour of flow and reflects the climatic and physiographic conditions in a basin. Differences in the regularity (stability) of the seasonal patterns reflect different dimensionality of the flow regimes, which can change subject to changes in climate conditions. The empirical orthogonal functions (EOF) approach can be used to describe the intr...