Introduction: Climate change and urbanization have been shown to alter plant phenology. However, a mechanistic understanding of these changes in flowering phenology and associated pollinator communities is lacking. Thus, this study was designed to examine finer scale flowering phenological patterns and driving processes in an arid urban ecosystem. Specifically, we tested the effect of water ava...

Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) requires the analysis of the non-linear response history of a structure for an ensemble of ground motions, each scaled to multiple levels of intensity and selected to cover the entire range of structural response. Recognizing that IDA of practical structures is computationally demanding, an approximate procedure based on the reduction of the number of ground m...

An accuracy assessment of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) vegetation continuous field (VCF) tree cover product using two independent ground-based tree cover databases was conducted. Ground data included 1176 Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots for Arizona and 2778 Southwest Regional GAP (SWReGAP) plots for Utah and western Colorado. Overall rms. error was 24% for...

No-till farming is an important approach to sustainable agriculture because it can conserve soil and water resources. Unfortunately, rodent populations can thrive under no-till conditions because burrow systems are not disrupted by annual plowing and plant residues build-up on the surface, providing cover and insulation. This can result in substantial crop damage. We assessed rodent populations...

(1) Urbanization threatens biodiversity, yet urban native plants support contributing to conservation and ecosystem services. Within agroecosystems, where non-native are abundant, may boost the abundance richness of beneficial arthropods. Nevertheless, current information focuses on pollinators, with little attention being paid other beneficials, like natural enemies. (2) We examined how specie...

Crop improvement efforts are targeting increased above-ground biomass and radiation-use efficiency as drivers for greater yield. Early ground cover and canopy height contribute to biomass production, but manual measurements of these traits, and in particular above-ground biomass, are slow and labor-intensive, more so when made at multiple developmental stages. These constraints limit the abilit...

Green space is one of the important infrastructures for keeping natural life and sustainability in modern urbanism and it provides excellent recreational opportunities for the people in the society. However, there are limiting factors in green space development, especially in arid regions, including extreme weather and soil temperatures, low average rainfall, drought, and high potential for eva...

Percent ground cover of vegetation is an important parameter for crop management. An innovational method based on features of objects was presented to automatically estimate percent ground cover of winter wheat from digital image analyses. Based on the features of wheat and its background components, an algorithm was designed to extract the percent ground cover, and the corresponding program wa...

trifolium spp. are native plants in iran exhibiting good ground cover po-tential. salinity is a major environmental stress and today, 20% of the world cultivated areas and nearly half of all irrigated lands are affected by salinity. the main aim of this research was to study morphological and physiological adaptations of these native species under different salinity levels for urban landscape u...

An indigenous species coastal planting trial was established at Ohiwa Spit, eastern Bay of Plenty in mid-2005 by the the Ohiwa Beach Coast Care group, Whakatohea Trust, Environment Bay of Plenty and Opotiki District Council. The aim of the trial was to evaluate the performance of a range of local indigenous ground cover and shrub species planted within three demarcated zones on a relatively sta...