Nearly one quarter of New Zealand’s unique vascular plant flora is threatened, and weed invasion is implicated in the decline of more than half of these threatened species. However, there is little experimental evidence showing that invasive weeds have a direct impact on threatened native plants. This study experimentally tested the hypothesis that competition with invasive weeds threatens the ...

Microbial weed control represents an innovative means to manage troublesome weeds and utilize the naturally occurring biological herbicides produced by soil microorganisms. These compounds kill or hinder the growth of weeds so that beneficial plant species can gain a competitive advantage. The vast diversity of microorganisms in our environment is largely untapped, and the potential discovery a...

Minimum cross-entropy is widely used in image segmentation for its effectiveness. However, when the algorithm applied to multi-threshold segmentation, there are some problems such as large amount of calculation, time-consuming and poor practicability due exhaustive search optimal threshold. Therefore, this paper, a hybrid whale optimization (IWOA) which incorporates (WOA) invasive weed (IWO) pr...

An improved adaptive beamforming technique of antenna arrays is introduced. The technique is implemented by using a novel Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) variant called Adaptive Dispersion Invasive Weed Optimization (ADIWO) where the seeds produced by a weed are dispersed in the search space with standard deviation specified by the fitness value of the weed. The adaptive seed dispersion makes ...

Our main objective in this article is to achieve minimum side lobe levels for a specific first null beam-width and also a minimum size of the circumference by an optimization-based design method for non-uniform, planar, and circular antenna arrays. Our approach is based on a new variant of Particle swarm Optimization technique. This new technique is a hybrid of Local Neighborhood based PSO with...

Heuristic optimization provides a robust and efficient approach for extracting approximate solutions of multi-objective problems because of their capability to evolve a set of non-dominated solutions distributed along the Pareto frontier. The convergence rate and suitable diversity of solutions are of great importance for multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. The focu...

Exotic invasive plants present one of the greatest challenges to natural resource management. These weeds can alter entire communities and ecosystems, substantially degrading important ecosystem services such as forage for wild and domestic herbivores, water and soil quality, recreational values, and wildlife habitat. Traditionally, weed management in natural areas has focused on removing the t...