Oregon surface waters are experiencing increased occurrence of potentially toxic cyanobacterial blooms (Fig. 1). It is necessary to use the modifier “potentially” because there is no toxin monitoring in the state of Oregon. Advisories are currently based on cell counts of potentially harmful cyanobacteria. This summary is intended to briefly review the recent research on the effects of a cyanob...

Cereal grains, such as corn, wheat, rice, and sorghum, are grown and processed into a wide variety of ingredients for animal and human food uses. The focus of this chapter will be on corn and wheat, but other cereals have significance in global processing and human nutrition. For example, rice is grown throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim and is primarily consumed with the endosperm intact. Rice...

Introduction Reliable and timely forecasts provide important and useful input for proper, foresighted and informed planning, more so, in agriculture which is full of uncertainties. Agriculture now-adays has become highly input and cost intensive. Under the changed scenario today, forecasting of various aspects relating to agriculture are becoming essential. But in-spite of strong need for relia...

This paper investigated the response of major food crop yields namely beans,cassava, Irish potatoes, maize and sweet potatoes to ongoing changes in climate inRwanda. The projected daily precipitation and temperature data for the period2000-2050 used in this study were generated by stochastic weather generator(LARS-WG) from daily raw data for the period 1961 -2000. These data werecollected from ...

Food security is the main concern in Africa as the production and productivity of crops are under continuous threat. Indigenous crops also known as orphanor as underutilizedcrops provide key contributions to food security under the present scenario of increasing world population and changing climate. Hence, these crops which belong to the major categories of cereals, legumes, fruits and root cr...

Diversification of agricultural systems is a standard suggestion for increasing the resilience of rain-fed subsistence farming to drought. However, grain crops share many physiological characteristics, potentially forming a plant functional type (PFT), a term ecologists apply to groups of species that respond in functionally similar ways to environmental variation. Here we test whether grain cr...

Imidazolinone herbicides, which include imazapyr, imazapic, imazethapyr, imazamox, imazamethabenz and imazaquin, control weeds by inhibiting the enzyme acetohydroxyacid synthase (AHAS), also called acetolactate synthase (ALS). AHAS is a critical enzyme for the biosynthesis of branched-chain amino acids in plants. Several variant AHAS genes conferring imidazolinone tolerance were discovered in p...

Genetic engineering is an application of biotechnology involving the manipulation of DNA and the transfer of gene components between species in order to encourage replication of desired traits (OTA 1992). Although there are many applications of genetic engineering in agriculture, the current focus of biotechnology is on developing herbicide tolerant crops and on pest and disease resistant crops...

Wild bees provide a free and potentially diverse ecosystem service to farmers growing pollination-dependent crops. While many crops benefit from insect pollination, soft fruit crops, including strawberries are highly dependent on this ecosystem service to produce viable fruit. However, as a result of intensive farming practices and declining pollinator populations, farmers are increasingly turn...

The protection of biodiversity and of ecosystem services ought to be a top priority, taken into consideration in the course of all human activities, because we depend on it fully now and for the future. In this context, we note that the ecological problems related to the cultivation of GE crops fail to differ in any fundamental way from the ecological problems associated with agriculture in gen...