One of the main manifestations of climate change will be increased rainfall variability. How to deal with this in agriculture will be a major societal challenge. In this paper we explore flexibility in land use, through deliberate seasonal adjustments in cropped area, as a specific strategy for coping with rainfall variability. Such adjustments are not incorporated in hydro-meteorological crop ...

Field experiments were conducted to validate a one-dimensional numerical Simple Soil Plant Atmospheric Transfer (SiSPAT) model that simulates heat and water transfer through the root zone of a surface irrigated, cropped sandy soil. The model accounts for the dominant processes involved in water and heat transfer in a cropped soil. Model validation used field experimental data from 2004 and sugg...

OBJECTIVES Nailfold videocapillaroscopy is being increasingly used as a marker of SSc-related microvascular disease, including in response to treatment. However, it requires further validation. Our aim was to assess the inter-observer, intra-observer and test-retest variability of semi-automated measurement of capillary features as well as of a manual density measurement. METHODS All capillar...

We investigated the effects of recent moisture history on the relative production of N2O and N2 during denitrification in soil from cropped and successional ecosystems. The soils were pedogenically identical but had been managed differently for the past decade. Sieved soils were amended with nitrate, glucose, and water. Long-wet and short-wet incubations received 80 and 0%, respectively, of pre...

In this paper, we extend our camera identification technology based on sensor noise to a more general setting when the image under investigation has been simultaneously cropped and scaled. The sensor fingerprint detection is formulated using hypothesis testing as a two-channel problem and a detector is derived using the generalized likelihood ratio test. A brute force search is proposed to find...

Alternative sources of energy are required for easing the burdens associated with use fossil fuels especially African nations. There barriers advanced biofuels such as immature technology, availability reliable feedstock data, policy instruments among others in many countries. The present study is aimed towards providing generation data from 21 major crops produced South Africa. By mining exist...

Calcium deficiency in apple fruit has been identified as a primary cause of bitter pit in apples, however some apples are not as susceptible as others. The apple cultivar ‘Scilate’ has been identified as less susceptible to bitter pit, but it is not known whether high calcium concentrations are what contribute this resistance. Because scilate is a more recent variety, little research has been d...

The human face is the most studied object category in visual neuroscience. In a quest for markers of face processing, event-related potential (ERP) studies have debated whether two peaks of activity - P1 and N170 - are category-selective. Whilst most studies have used photographs of unaltered images of faces, others have used cropped faces in an attempt to reduce the influence of features surro...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of head hair on thermoregulatory responses when cooling the head under heat stress. Eight young males participated in six experimental conditions: normal hair (100-130 mm length) and cropped hair (5 mm length) with three water inlet temperatures of 10, 15, and 20°C. The head and neck of subjects were cooled by a liquid perfused hood while...