Scattered trees support high levels of farmland biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, but they are threatened by agricultural intensification, urbanization, and land abandonment. This study aimed to map and quantify the decline of orchard meadows (scattered fruit trees of high nature conservation value) for a region in Southwestern Germany for the 1968 2009 period and ...

Mapping is a significant issue in mobile robot applications. Mobile robots can build a map or a model of the environment using different sensors. An orchard is a suitable agricultural environment for mobile robot applications since it is a semi-structured environment, where trees are planted in nominally straight rows. This paper presents a new method to extract features from the orchard enviro...

The recent divergence of Orchard (Icterus spurius spurius) and Fuertes’s Orioles (I. s. fuertesi) makes them an ideal system for investigating species boundaries. Orchard and Fuertes’s Orioles differ in several respects. They have distinct breeding ranges—Fuertes’s Orioles breed in eastern coastal Mexico, whereas Orchard Orioles breed throughout eastern and central North America—and differ in p...

This study was conducted to develop a software program which computes optimal path for autonomous navigation in orchard, especially for speed sprayer. Possibilities of autonomous navigation in orchard were shown by other researches which have minimized distance error between planned path and performed path. But, research of planning an optimal path for speed sprayer in orchard is hardly founded...

In 1989, identical crosses (2-3 females within males) were performed with Picea abies (L.) Karst. in a greenhouse seed orchard at Biri nursery and in an outdoor seed orchard at Huse, 32 km north of Biri. Pollination began 17 days earlier in the greenhouse than outdoors at Huse. The potted grafts in the greenhouse were moved outdoors when the seed cones were no longer receptive. Twelve full-sib ...

Let G be an abstract graph. Motivated by the Orchard relation, introduced in [3, 4], we have defined the Orchard crossing number of G [5], in a similar way to the well-known rectilinear crossing number of an abstract graph G (denoted by cr(G), see [1, 8]). A general reference for crossing numbers can be [6]. The Orchard crossing number is interesting for several reasons. First, it is based on t...

Autonomous operation and information processing in an orchard environment requires an accurate inventory of the trees. Individual trees must be identified and catalogued in order to represent their distinct measures such as yield count, crop health and canopy volume. Hand labelling individual trees is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. This paper presents a trunk localisation pipeli...

Various plants and resources such as orchards are vulnerable to the detrimental effects of successful invasions by alien animal or plant species. To outline an appropriate policy response, we first use renewal theory to construct a stochastic model of optimal orchard management in the presence of a deleterious alien species. Next, we derive the orchard manager’s long run expected cost of orchar...

In this paper we present an approach to tree recognition and localisation in orchard environments for tree-crop applications. The method builds on the natural structure of the orchard by first segmenting the data into individual trees using a Hidden Semi-Markov Model. Second, a descriptor for representing the characteristics of the trees is introduced, allowing a Hidden Markov Model based match...

Both the Vogel Spindle and Spanish Bush systems will allow for the development of a “pedestrian orchard”. A pedestrian orchard is defined as an orchard where two-thirds of the crop can be harvested from the ground, without the use of tall ladders (Fig. 1). Harvesting fruit from the ground greatly enhances worker productivity. In a study that I conducted in The Dalles, Oregon pickers were able t...