Glyphosate-resistant (GR) Kochia scoparia has evolved in dryland chemical fallow systems throughout North America and the mechanism of resistance involves 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) gene duplication. Agricultural fields in four states were surveyed for K. scoparia in 2013 and tested for glyphosate-resistance level and EPSPS gene copy number. Glyphosate resistance was co...

This study uses data from forty-nine 20 m × 20 m permanent plots measured in 1976, 1982, 1989 and 1997-2002 in Wakatipu Forest, western Otago. We relate changes in red (Nothofagus fusca), silver (Nothofagus menziesii) and mountain beech (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides) forest vegetation to the presence of fallow deer (Dama dama). Vegetation composition is likely to have been altered pr...

The ongoing diversification of agricultural lands in Hawaii to replace sugarcane and pineapple plantations is a major challenge. It presents an interesting case study for global concerns with land degradation-land use interaction. The important question posed by this paper is: will “diversified” crops have a different impact on the natural resource base and environmental quality from earlier cr...

Historically, both conservation research and policy have concentrated on primary forests. Increasingly, however, the focus is being broadened to include human-dominated landscapes, such as agroforestry systems, managed forests, hedgerows, and fallow lands. One reason is that considerable research has demonstrated that such landscapes can provide many of the same ecological services as primary f...

Apple production systems are an important component in the Chinese agricultural sector with 1.99 million ha plantation. The orchards in China could play an important role in the carbon (C) cycle of terrestrial ecosystems and contribute to C sequestration. The carbon sequestration capability in apple orchards was analyzed through identifying a set of potential assessment factors and their weight...

Roof rats (Rattus rattus) damage an estimated 5 to 10% of the developing nut crop in Hawaiian macadamia (Macadamia integrifolia) orchards. Relevant aspects of roof rat biology in macadamia orchards have and continue to be studied with the ultimate goal of developing an ecologically sound and cost-effective integrated pest management plan. The field component of a two-year study of roof rat popu...

Face clustering is a task to partition facial images into disjoint clusters. In this paper, we investigate a specific problem of face clustering in videos. Unlike traditional face clustering problem with a given collection of images from multiple sources, our task deals with set of face tracks with information about frame ID. Thus, we can exploit two kinds of prior knowledge about the temporal ...

Gameplay in real-time strategy games seems somehow to be confined to a de facto standard where economical micromanagement is equally important as combat strategy, if not more important. To enable stronger combat-oriented gameplay without sacrificing other key aspects of the genre, we propose an automated system for scheduling unit training, which we believe may allow the exploration of new para...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) and nitrogen (N) contents are controlled partly by plant inputs that can be manipulated in agricultural systems. Although SOC and N pools occur mainly in the topsoil (upper 0.30 m), there are often substantial pools in the subsoil that are commonly assumed to be stable. We tested the hypothesis that contrasting long-term management systems change the dynamics of SOC an...