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...

Objective: A field experiment was conducted in order to study the effect of phosphorus and manure application on agronomic performance and seed yield of groundnut. Methods: Factorial combination of two groundnut varieties (‘Werer 962’ and ‘Oldhale’), Three rates of phosphorus (0, 90 and 180 kg P2O5 ha-1) and three rates of manur...

We studied the spatial pattern of seed predation across a forest-old field edge in both fall and winter to assess the potential for seed predators to influence plant spatial patterns. We used a 100 x 100 m grid that began 30 m inside the forest and extended 60 m into the old field. Inside this grid we placed seed stations at regular 10 m intervals and monitored seed removal. Seed predation vari...

UNLABELLED • PREMISE OF THE STUDY Assessing seed quality in orchids has been hindered by stringent germination requirements. Seed quality has traditionally been assessed in orchids using in vitro or in situ germination protocols or viability staining. However, these methods are not always well suited for rapid assessment of viability in the context of ecological studies.• METHODS The potent...

To study the effects of both drought stress and seed zinc and iron concentrations on the photosynthesis, chlorophyll fluorescence, and proline and carbohydrate accumulations in soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr. cv. M9) leaf, a split plot experiment was carried out in 2012 based on a randomized complete block design with three replications in greenhouse conditions at Yasouj University. Drought str...

Immigration rates of species into communities are widely understood to influence community diversity, which in turn is widely expected to influence the susceptibility of ecosystems to species invasion. For a given community, however, immigration processes may impact diversity by means of two separable components: the number of species represented in seed inputs and the density of seed per speci...

The sustainability of seed extraction from natural populations has been questioned recently. Increased recruitment failure under intense seed harvesting suggests that seed extraction intensifies source limitation. Nevertheless, areas where more seeds are collected tend to also have more intense hunting of seed-dispersing animals. We studied whether such hunting, by limiting disperser activity, ...

Seed dormancy, by controlling the timing of germination, can strongly affect plant survival. The kind of seed dormancy, therefore, can influence both population and species-level processes such as colonization, adaptation, speciation, and extinction. We used a dataset comprising over 14,000 taxa in 318 families across the seed plants to test hypotheses on the evolution of different kinds of see...