Plant and soil properties cooperatively structure soil microbial communities, with implications for ecosystem functioning. However, the extent to which each factor contributes to community structuring is not fully understood. To quantify the influence of plants and soil properties on microbial diversity and composition in an agricultural context, we conducted an experiment within a corn-based a...

Comparative studies have usually shown higher yields in conventional cropping systems (CCS) than in organic cropping systems (OCS). By utilizing a long-term field experiment on silt soil with 18 years of cropping history (1982–1999), including three OCSs and one CCS, we studied if this is true also for strawberry. The strawberry experiment was conducted in 2000–2002. The experiment had one CCS ...

One of the principal aims of alternative cropping systems is to minimize excessive loss of N while maximizing N use efficiency and meeting crop N requirements. Many such cropping systems substitute intensive application of synthetic fertilizer with organic inputs, such as N2-fixing legumes. The effectiveness of legume residues as a N source for subsequent crops depends heavily on temporal N rel...

Grass cropping in the rotation and the use of no-till seeding appear to be important components for developing sustainable cropping systems. Grass cropping and no-till seeding improve soil organic matter content, increase the soil microbial biomass, increase earthworm numbers, likely cause a buildup of fungivorous microarthropods and nematodes, and greatly increases the resistance of soil to er...

Image cropping is a technique that is used to select the most relevant areas of an image, discarding the useless ones. Handmade selection, especially in case of large photo collections, is a time consuming task. Automatic image cropping techniques may help users, suggesting to them which part of the image is the most relevant, according to specific criteria. We suppose that the most visually sa...

One of the main features of IEEE 802.16m is the relay transmission which could not only extend the service coverage, but also improve the quality-of-service (QoS) to the mobile stations. In this paper, we consider the cooperation among relay stations and mobile stations to improve the performance of relay transmission in IEEE 802.16m network. In this case, the relay stations and mobile stations...

This paper presents an optimal solution for amplify-and-forward (AF) single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless distributed relay networks. The optimal solutions are determined based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion for optimum nondiagonal and diagonal relay amplifying matrices under the transmit power constraints at the relays. The bit err...

The performance of cooperative network can be increased by using relay selection technique. Therefore, interest in relay selection is sloping upward. We proposed two new relay selection schemes based on fuzzy logic for dual hop cooperative communication. These relay selection schemes require SNR (signal to noise ratio), cooperative gain and channel gain as input fuzzy parameters for selection o...