Ant-aphid interactions may affect host plants in several ways, however, most studies measure only the amount of fruit and seed produced, and do not test seed viability. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the effects of the presence of ant-aphid interactions upon host plant productivity and seed viability in two different contexts: isolated and within an arthropod community. For this...

The alfalfa leafcutting bee (ALCB), Megachile rotundata F. (Megachildae), was accidentally introduced into the United States by the 1940s. Nest management of this Eurasian nonsocial pollinator transformed the alfalfa seed industry in North America, tripling seed production. The most common ALCB management practice is the loose cell system, in which cocooned bees are removed from nesting cavitie...

Abstract Traditional grain cleaning methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and yet very inefficient. The use of available mechanical seed cleaners is widely limited since they expensive to own, operate, maintain. A Pedal Operated Seed Cleaner (PoS-Cleaner) was developed its performance evaluated. Appropriate engineering principles methodologies were used in the sizing construction machine...

When traveling in cars, we can unintentionally carry and disperse weed seed; but which species, and where are they a problem? To answer these questions, we systematically searched the scientific literature to identify all original research studies that assess seed transported by cars and listed the species with seed on/in cars. From the 13 studies that fit these criteria, we found 626 species f...

The soil seed bank is the basis for community establishment and permanence and plays a primary role in natural restoration of degraded or altered ecosystems. As part of a restoration project, this study aimed to quantify the soil seed bank and to evaluate the effect of the needle litter layer on seedling emergence. Soil samples from a pine plantation were collected at random in the field and se...

The research for this paper was undertaken as part of a project on The Financial Implications of Environmental Legislation funded by the ESRC (L320253226), for which support we are very grateful. We are grateful to our collaborators on this project-especially Tim Jewell and George McKenzie-for useful discussions, which contributed to our thinking on this paper. An earlier version was presented ...

While leaf-cutter ants are thought to collect mainly vegetative plant material, they have also been observed collecting seeds or fruit parts on the forest floor (Alvarez-Buylla & Martı́nez-Ramos 1990, Kaspari 1996). For example, leafcutter ants have been observed carrying considerable numbers of Brosimum alicastrum Sw. and Cecropia spp. seeds into their nests (Wirth 1996) and Leal & Oliveira (19...

Soap is sodium or potassium salt of fatty acid produced by saponification reaction using hydroxide. It used for cleaning, bathing, and washing. Soaps were from bleached palm oil (BPO) Moringa oleifera seed the cold process method with slight modification. The physicochemical properties (acid value, peroxide iodine value moisture content) determined it showed that values are within standard spec...

The technique which is presented here is based on careful attention to image cleaning in order to achieve robust automatic filament detection and avoid confusion between filaments and image defects, due to particular shapes of filaments. The main part of the detection process is based on seed selection and region growing. The procedures developed have been tested on four months of full-disk ima...