Construction cost (CC) is a quantifiable measure of energy demand for biomass production and is related to energy-use efficiency. Low construction cost was hypothesized to give invaders a growth advantage by utilizing energy efficiently. The present study examines the energetic cost of leaf construction in the invasive weed Mikania micrantha H.B.K. and its five common co-occurring species (Ager...

BACKGROUND Biological invasions are fundamentally biogeographic processes that occur over large spatial scales. Interactions with soil microbes can have strong impacts on plant invasions, but how these interactions vary among areas where introduced species are highly invasive vs. naturalized is still unknown. In this study, we examined biogeographic variation in plant-soil microbe interactions ...

The rust fungus Maravalia cryptostegiae, from south-west Madagascar, was introduced into Australia in 1995 as a classical biological control agent against the highly invasive rubber-vine weed Cryptostegia grandiflora, a woody climber endemic to Madagascar. The rust was released at 69 sites between 1995 and 1997 and is now established throughout the plant’s exotic range in Queensland, estimated ...

Multimodal optimization aims at finding multiple global and local optima (as opposed to a single solution) of a function, so that the user can have a better knowledge about different optimal solutions in the search space and as and when needed, the current solution may be switched to another suitable one while still maintaining the optimal system performance. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) due t...

The development of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and light weight imaging sensors has resulted in significant interest in their use for remote sensing applications. While significant attention has been paid to the collection, calibration, registration and mosaicking of data collected from small UAVs, the interpretation of these data into semantically meaningful information can still ...