Willows (Salix spp.) are important biomass crops due to their ability to grow rapidly with low fertilizer inputs and ease of cultivation in short-rotation coppice cycles. They are relatively undomesticated and highly diverse, but functional testing to identify useful allelic variation is time-consuming in trees and transformation is not yet possible in willow. Arabidopsis is heralded as a model...

Chrysomelid leaf beetles use chemical defenses to overcome predatory attack and microbial infestation. Larvae of Chrysomela lapponica that feed on willow sequester plant-derived salicin and other leaf alcohol glucosides, which are modified in their defensive glands to bioactive compounds. Salicin is converted into salicylaldehyde by a consecutive action of a β-glucosidase and salicyl alcohol ox...

In the last decade, plant ecologists have focussed more on the occurrence of positive plant–plant interactions than ever before. Especially in severe environments, such as the Arctic, species removal experiments tend to find facilitative rather than competitive effects, casting doubt on the importance of competition under extreme growing conditions. Two approaches to measure plant–plant interac...

News from the Society Botany 2003 From the Forum. Science Education and the National Science Education Standards. (Bruce Alberts) 86 Plenary Address. The All Species Initiative and the Future of Life. (Edward O. Wilson) 87 President-elect's Address. Organismal Biology as an Essential Link between Molecular Biology and Earth Systems Studies. Linda E. Graham 88 New Officers for 2003-04 91 BSA Hon...

BACKGROUND There is a general belief that insect outbreak risk is higher in plant monocultures than in natural and more diverse habitats, although empirical studies investigating this relationship are lacking. In this study, using density data collected over seven years at 40 study sites, we compare the temporal population variability of the leaf beetle Phratora vulgatissima between willow plan...

In some classification tasks, all patterns in a field, such as digits in a ZIP-code image, originate from the same, but unknown, source (writer/print style). The class-conditional feature distributions depend on the source of the patterns. Several sources may share the same distribution, or style. The style-conditional distributions are estimated from the training set. The optimal field-classif...

Anoplophora malasiaca (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) is a serious pest that destroys various landscape and crop trees in Japan. We evaluated the precopulatory responses of three different A. malasiaca populations collected from mandarin orange, willow and blueberry trees. Most of the males accepted mates from within the same host plant population as well as females from the willow and blueberry pop...

Differences in soil and habitat conditions, depending on the type of soil on which shrubby species of willow Salix L. are being grown for energy purposes, are reflected in weed infestation species diversity and the distinctiveness of these crops, and require an individual program of control and reduction of the abundance of competitive herbaceous vegetation. Our study aimed at determining soil ...