Increasing yield potential of lowland rice remains to be the top priority in rice geneticimprovement programmes, because rice farmers’ primary concern is still grain yield and world rice production has to increase by 1% annually in the next 20 years to meet the demand of the growing population. Improvements in yield potential of irrigated lowland rice were achieved under ample supply of water a...

Raw material of heavy oil and gas deposits, developed in per Caspian lowland (Orenburg, Astrakhan, Tengiz, Zanazol), is characterized by high content of acid components (H2S, CO2) and sulphoorganic compounds. Under such circumstances the importance of industrial mining and development of new, economical and wasteless technologies, providing full and experienced usage of all raw compounds being ...

Ecosystem properties of surficial (0–10 cm) soils in remnant herbaceous patches were compared to those of contrasting woody plant patch types (upland discrete cluster, upland grove, and lowland woodland) where shifting land cover is known to have occurred over the past 50–77 yr. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and quantify the biogeochemical consequences and subsequent developmental r...

The origin and diversification of Sino-Tibetan speaking populations have been long-standing hot debates. However, the limited genetic information of Tibetan populations keeps this topic far from clear. In the present study, we genotyped 15 forensic autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) from 803 unrelated Tibetan individuals from Gansu Province (635 from Gannan and 168 from Tianzhu) in northwest...

Crop landraces are managed populations that evolve in response to gene flow and selection. Cross-pollination among fields, seed sharing by farmers, and selection by management and environmental conditions play roles in shaping crop characteristics. We used common gardens to explore the local adaptation of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) landrace populations from Chiapas, Mexico to altitude. We sowed...

We investigated the use of multi-spectral Landsat OLI imagery for delineating mangrove, lowland evergreen, upland evergreen and mixed deciduous forest types in Myanmar’s Tanintharyi Region and estimated the extent of degraded forest for each unique forest type. We mapped a total of 16 natural and human land use classes using both a Random Forest algorithm and a multivariate Gaussian model while...

The multistep method here applied in studying the genetic structure of a low dispersal and philopatric species, such as the Fire Salamander Salamandra salamandra, was proved to be effective in identifying the hierarchical structure of populations living in broad-leaved forest ecosystems in Northern Italy. In this study, 477 salamander larvae, collected in 28 sampling populations (SPs) in the Pr...

Ten to twelve thousand years ago, when humans first came from the north to enter the vast tropical evergreen lowland forests of Mexico and Central America, these forests stretched for what must have seemed an eternity, from the Veracruz lowlands 2,600 km southeastward into northern South America and beyond. Even eight to ten millennia later, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived on the shores...

Chytridiomycosis, caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), is an emergent infectious disease partially responsible for worldwide amphibian population declines. The spread of Bd along highland habitats (> 500 meters above sea level, m a.s.l.) of Costa Rica and Panamá is well documented and has been linked to amphibian population collapses. In contrast, data are scarce o...