Despite the widespread concern about the fate of pollinators and the ecosystem services they deliver, we still have surprisingly scarce scientific data on the magnitude of pollinator declines and its actual contribution to crop pollination and food security. We use recently published data from northeastern North America to show that studies at both the local and regional scales are needed to un...

The goal of this study is to show the usefulness of reinforcement learning (RL) to solve a common greenhouse climate optimisation problem. The problem is to minimise the daily heating cost while achieving simultaneously two agronomic goals, namely maintaining a good crop growth and an appropriate development rate. The complexity of the problem is due to the very different time constants of thes...

A 3-year microplot study was conducted to characterize the interaction between Meloidogyne arenaria race 1 (MA1) and M. hapla (MH), as affected by the five peanut genotypes: Florigiant, NC 7, NC 6, NC Ac 18416, and NC Ac 18016. The interactive effects on infection (total parasitic forms per root unit) and reproduction potentials of each nematode species and crop damage were determined. As a sin...

This paper proposes an automatic expert system for accuracy crop row detection in maize fields based on images acquired from a vision system. Different applications in maize, particularly those based on site specific treatments, require the identification of the crop rows. The vision system is designed with a defined geometry and installed onboard a mobile agricultural vehicle, i.e. submitted t...

Encarsia formosa Gahan (Hymenoptera: Aphelinidae) is a solitary endoparasitoid that is commercially reared and released for augmentative biological control of whiteflies infesting greenhouse crops. In most areas in China, the invasive and destructive whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) biotype Q has replaced B. tabaci biotype B and has become dominant between the two. A...

The intrinsic toxicity of lepidopteran-active Bt proteins necessitates assessment of non-target risks associated with environmental release of transgenic crops expressing these proteins. Principles of ecological risk assessment provide a means for assessing non-target risks when information regarding exposure to the toxin and species-specific effects are lacking. This is shown for the case of B...

Actinomycetes are involved in important environmental processes such as the decomposition of organic matter. In this study, we examined the impact of crop rotation on the actinomycetes community colonizing rice straw residues in soil over 3 field seasons by means of Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) fingerprinting analysis of actinomycetes 16S rRNA gene fragments amplified from fie...

Many ecological studies have focused on the effects of transgenes in field crops, but few have considered multiple transgenes in diversified vegetable systems. We compared the epigeal, or soil surface-dwelling, communities of Coleoptera and Formicidae between transgenic and isoline vegetable systems consisting of sweet corn, potato, and acorn squash, with transgenic cultivars expressing Cry1(A)...

This review analyzes the potential role and long-term effects of field perennial polycultures (mixtures) in agricultural systems, with the aim of reducing the trade-offs between provisioning and regulating ecosystem services. First, crop rotations are identified as a suitable tool for the assessment of the long-term effects of perennial polycultures on ecosystem services, which are not visible ...

the  present study was aimed  at comparing the ability of three crop plants for phytoremediation of zinc (zn) and nickel (zn) from soils. a factorial (3×2×3) experiment based on rcbd was  used to compare the treatments,  and was repeated three times. the first factor was crop type (wheat, clover and rapeseed), the second factor was heavy metal types (zinc (zn) and nickel (ni)) and the third fac...