In agro-ecosystems, fertilization practices are crucial for sustaining crop productivity. Here, based on a 50-year long-term experiment, we studied the influence of fertilization practices (inorganic and/or organic) and nitrogen (N) application rates on (i) soil physicochemical properties, (ii) microbial and earthworm communities and (iii) crop production. Our results showed that soil organic c...

Recent automated crop mapping via supervised learning-based methods have demonstrated unprecedented improvement over classical techniques. Classification accuracies of these degrade considerably in cross-year mapping. Cross-year is more useful as it allows the prediction following years’ maps using previously labeled data. We propose vector dynamic time warping (VDTW), an innovative multi-year ...

Reproductive traits are key parameters for the evolution of invasiveness in weedy crop-wild hybrids. In Beta vulgaris, cultivated beets hybridize with their wild relatives in the seed production areas, giving rise to crop-wild hybrid weed beets. We investigated the genetic structure, the variation in first-year flowering and the variation in mating system among weed beet populations occurring w...

A method is proposed to handle crop succession requirements when determining the cultivated areas of n crops for a planning period of T years. For each year, the decision variables represent the areas where a sequence of m crops is cultivated, m ≥ 1. Here, m + 1 is the length of the longest forbidden sequence of crops not containing any forbidden subsequences. The crop succession constraints ar...

1. Eruptions occur when a species appears in unusually high densities within and often outside of its normal range. We used 30 years of Christmas Bird Counts combined with cone/seed-crop data on boreal coniferous trees, breeding bird surveys, and weather records to test correlates of winter eruptions by 11 species of primarily boreal North American seed-eating birds. 2. Eruptions of six species...

An important aspect of below-ground crop physiology is its root foraging performance, which is inherently related to root system architecture (RSA). A 2-yr field experiment was conducted and the field-state wheat RSA was phenotyped for root foraging trait (RFT). Four RSA-derived traits, i.e. Root horizontal angle (RHA), axial root expansion volume (AREV), RSA convex hull volume (CHV) and effect...

Exposure to elevated concentrations of surface ozone (O3) causes substantial reductions in the agricultural yields of many crops. As emissions of O3 precursors rise in many parts of the world over the next few decades, yield reductions from O3 exposure appear likely to increase the challenges of feeding a global population projected to grow from 6 to 9 billion between 2000 and 2050. This study ...

Current corn and soybean productivity data is needed in Illinois for land-use planning, sustainable farm management, and accurate land appraisal. The out-of-date source of soil productivity data is Circular 1156 Soil Productivity in Illinois (Fehrenbacher et al., 1978, Soil productivity in Illinois. UIUC. College of Agriculture. COOP. EXT. SERV. Circular 1156). A new major analysis based on cur...

During the last few years diffusion juice, thin juice, carbon­ treated thick juice, and molasses produced at a.Steffen house were analyzed for nitrogen and inorganic content. It was noticed that the concentration of the nonsucrose constituents varied con­ siderably during the crop year and that the changes occurred at about the same time each year. This report will deal with the nonsucrose cons...