Animal selection for genetic improvement of productivity may lead to an increase in inbreeding through the use of techniques that enhance the reproductive capability of selected animals. Therefore, breeding strategies aim to balance maintaining genetic variability and acceptable fitness levels with increasing productivity. The present study demonstrates the effectiveness of genomic-based optimu...

due to its location in the dry belt, the vast country of iran has always been faced with the problem of water shortages. in such a climate one should take measures to increase the productivity and improve the efficiency of irrigation through expansion of water-conserving technology in the agricultural sector, as this is the largest and most important consumer of water. therefore this study aime...

Surface water quality deterioration is a serious problem in many rapidly urbanizing catchments in developing countries. There is currently a lack of studies that quantify water quality variation (deterioration or otherwise) due to both socio-economic and infrastructure development in a catchment. This paper investigates the causes of water quality changes over the rapid urbanization period of 1...

The impacts of global climate change have been a worldwide concern for several research areas, including those dealing with resources essential to human well being, such as agriculture, which directly impact economic activities and food security. Here we evaluate the relative effect of climate (as indicated by the Ecological Niche Model-ENM) and agricultural technology on actual soybean product...

THUMMALAPENTA, SURESH. Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Source Code. (Under the direction of Tao Xie.) The major goal of software development is to deliver high-quality software efficiently. To achieve this goal of delivering high-quality software efficiently, programmers often reuse existing frameworks or libraries, hereby referred to as libraries, instead of developing s...

Turf grasses are considered an integral part of landscape ecological systems worldwide which provide functional, recreational and aesthetic benefits to society and the environment. In arid and semiarid regions (e.g., Mediterranean region), turf grass is usually grown under harsh and unfavorable growing conditions with low rainfall and high rates of evapotranspiration as well as in soils with nu...

the management of water table is introduced as one of the major parts of the solutions in water resources management. this method could play a significant role in protecting water resources, increasing irrigation efficiency, preserving nutrients in soil, and protecting the quality of surface downstream, and as well, of groundwater. towards this end, a laboratory study has been done on the effec...

Opposition to genetically modified food encompasses environmental concerns, food-safety concerns and ethical objections. Potential environmental benefits from transgenic crops are not well accepted. Genetic modification is a credence attribute that cannot be detected by consumers without labelling. In the absence of labelling a pooling equilibrium results in an adverse quality effect for those ...

sustainable exploitation of land resources is directly affected by considering soil quality which finally will also conclude environmental protection. therefore, assessing different soil quality aspects which are sensitive to various land management practices seems too important. in this study, some selected soil quality indicators have been compared in five land use systems including untouched...

Although the impacts of the loss of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning are well established, the importance of the loss of biodiversity relative to other human-caused drivers of environmental change remains uncertain. Results of 11 experiments show that ecologically relevant decreases in grassland plant diversity influenced productivity at least as much as ecologically relevant changes in ni...