A geographic information system (GIS) based manure application plan has been developed for the site-specific application of animal waste to agricultural fields in the Westbrook sub-catchment of the Murray-Darling Basin, south-east Queensland, Australia. Sites suitable for animal waste application were identified using a GIS based weighted linear combination (WLC) model. The degree of land suita...

Over the period from February 24-28, 2003, the albedo of two partially snow-covered sites in northwestern Iowa was characterized to validate snow albedos retrieved from data collected by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. Below average snowfall provided the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of snow albedos retrievals from the current MODIS snow-albedo al...

The prevalence of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Escherichia coli (E. coli) is increasing rapidly in both hospital environments and animal farms. A lot of animal manure has been directly applied into arable fields in developing countries. But the impact of ESBL-positive bacteria from animal manure on the agricultural fields is sparse, especially in the rural regions of Tai'an...

Heliothis virescens F. is an important polyphagous pest that can develop on >100 plant species, including 20 economic crops. Populations of this insect are believed to be locally maintained on a few crops and weed hosts in Washington County, MS. To find the intrinsic value of these plants for the development of H. virescens populations, we fed different laboratory and wild colonies with fresh a...

Remote-controlled (RC) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used to study the movement of agricultural threat agents (e.g., plant and animal pathogens, invasive weeds, and exotic insects) above crop fields, but these RC UAVs are operated entirely by a ground-based pilot and often demonstrate large fluctuations in sampling height, sampling pattern, and sampling speed. In this paper, we desc...

Wetlands worldwide are becoming increasingly degraded, and this has motivated many attempts to manage and restore wetland ecosystems. Restoration actions require a large resource investment, so it is critical to measure the outcomes of these management actions. We evaluated the restoration of floodplain wetland vegetation across a chronosequence of land uses, using remote sensing analyses. We c...

Farmland species provide key ecological services that support agricultural production, but are under threat from agricultural intensification and mechanization. In order to design effective measures to mitigate agricultural impact, simultaneous investigations of different taxonomic groups across several regions are required. Therefore, four contrasting taxonomic groups were investigated: plants...

The ASTER sensor onboard NASA’s Earth observing satellite Terra is an optical remote sensor comprised of 14 spectral bands ranging from the visible to thermal infrared region. With its multispectral bands the sensor bears the potential to provide data for both a detailed land use classification of heterogeneously vegetated areas. This study evaluates the potential of ASTER data for land use cla...

Today, agricultural vehicles are available that can automatically perform tasks such as weed detection and spraying, mowing, and sowing while being steered automatically. However, for such systems to be fully autonomous and self-driven, not only their specific agricultural tasks must be automated. An accurate and robust perception system automatically detecting and avoiding all obstacles must a...