those methods as they have been used from the Canadian Prairie Provinces to the southern Great Plains of Successful dryland crop production in the semiarid Great Plains the United States and the resultant effects on system of North America must make efficient use of precipitation that is often limited and erratic in spatial and temporal distribution. The purpose WUE. Additionally, differences i...

Madagascar. located 375 km off the coast of Mozambique, is considered to be the 4,h biggest island in the world. Due to its particular evolutionary history, the island boasts a rich biodiversity characterised by a high degree of endemicity. Mittermeier et al. (1999) declared Madagascar to be a hotspot of biodiversity that should be protected at any cost. He thereby draws attention to the manifo...

Within-population genetic diversity influences many ecological processes, but few studies have examined how environmental conditions may impact these short-term diversity effects. Over four growing seasons, we followed experimental populations of a clonal, ubiquitous weed, Taraxacum officinale, with different numbers of genotypes in relatively favorable fallow field and unfavorable mowed lawn e...

In the tropics, shifting cultivation has long been attributed to large scale forest degradation, and remains a major source of uncertainty in forest carbon accounting. In the Philippines, shifting cultivation, locally known as kaingin, is a major land-use in upland areas. We measured the distribution and recovery of aboveground biomass carbon along a fallow gradient in post-kaingin secondary fo...

Fallow deer in Poland is an alien species, with an ambiguous legal status. It is considered both, a game and a farm animal, which introductions in recent years led to a substantial increase of its population. As a representative of cervids, it shares with other free-ranging and domestic ruminants many of gastrointestinal helminths, among them an alien Ashworthius sidemi, the nematode of a high ...

Management practices are needed to reduce dryland soil CO(2) emissions and to increase C sequestration. We evaluated the effects of tillage and cropping sequence combinations and N fertilization on dryland crop biomass (stems + leaves) and soil surface CO(2) flux and C content (0- to 120-cm depth) in a Williams loam from May to October, 2006 to 2008, in eastern Montana. Treatments were no-tille...

Tillage practices can influence crop root development. Root distributions were determined for wheat (Tdicum aestivum L.) grown in a wheat-fallow rotation during the 1977-1978 winter wheat crop year on an Alliance silt loam (Aridic Argiustoll). The fallow tillage treatments were plow, subtillage, and chemical (no tillage). Each tillage treatment was split into subplots for N application of 0 or ...

Effects of inbreeding on individual fitness are of long-standing interest in evolutionary biology and conservation studies. Since estimation of the inbreeding coefficient of a given individual is often impossible in wild populations, some authors have attempted to demonstrate inbreeding depression in such populations by correlating the multi-locus marker heterozygosity of individuals with a tra...

Fallow management is a common practice of traditional shifting cultivation in Southeast Asia and it survives throughout the region for many centuries (Spencer 1966). The systems are often found among the ethnic minorities in the region but governments, on the other hand, see the system as a primitive form of agricultural production, destruction to the forests and watersheds, wasteful and unprod...

BACKGROUND Lévy flights are random walks, the step lengths of which come from probability distributions with heavy power-law tails, such that clusters of short steps are connected by rare long steps. Lévy walks maximise search efficiency of mobile foragers. Recently, several studies raised some concerns about the reliability of the statistical analysis used in previous analyses. Further, it is ...