Orchard workers in north China are highly exposed to orchard pollens, especially peach and other Rosaceae family pollens during pollination season. The aim of this study was to investigate whether occupational allergy to peach tree pollen as a member of Rosaceae family is IgE-mediated and to evaluate the cross-reactivity among Rosaceae family pollens. Allergen skin test and conjunctival challen...

Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot threatened by habitat loss, which is detrimental to the future survival of forest-dwelling herpetofauna. For conservation purposes, it is essential to determine how species respond to different types of anthropogenic habitat alteration. We conducted standardized field surveys (a variation of visual encounter survey) to assess species richness, abundance and ...

Crop residue is a major source of soil organic matter; therefore, application crop straw to contributes the sustainable development agriculture. To better understand transformation in orchard soils, we investigated relationship between characteristics decomposition and functional diversity associated microbial communities long-term peach orchard, China. Mesh bags, each containing 30 g corn or b...

Carotenoids produce the brilliant red, orange, and yellow colors of many animals. However, melanin pigments can also confer some of these same hues. Because carotenoid and melanin colors are produced in different ways and may serve different signaling functions, either within or between species, it is important to establish whether one or both types of pigment are responsible for coloration. We...

Information gathering and processing in horticulture helps optimise control processes and can enable more precise farm management. Robotics and automation are helping make high resolution, timely, farm wide measurements for tasks such as yield estimation, crop health and soil analysis. An efficient means of storing and processing such information is to discretise it to individual trees. To auto...

The blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria (Say), is a solitary bee that is an excellent pollinator of tree fruit orchards. Due to the annual rising costs of honey bee hive rentals, many orchardists are eager to develop management tools and practices to support O. lignaria as an alternative pollinator. Establishing O. lignaria pollination as a sustainable industry requires careful consideration of bo...

Soil-water characteristic curves were determined for Krome calcareous very gravelly loam soil in the laboratory and in situ in an orchard. In the laboratory, soil-water retention was determined with a pressure plate and pressure Tempe cells for soil collected from vegetable fields. In the orchard, soil-water suction measured with tensiometers was compared to volumetric soil-water content (E) de...

the initial step in any breeding program including the breeding of walnut is an evaluation of the genetic diversity of its population and on identification of its superior and promising genotypes. this research was carried out during 2009-2010 growing seasons to evaluate the walnut genotypes, population grown in the vicinities of eghlid city, as one of the richest walnut population regions in t...

This study shows that disturbance caused by cover-crop removal (CCR) in an organic olive orchard affects ground-spider populations. The effect of CCR on various organic olive-orchard plots was assessed by monitoring the abundance and diversity of ground-dwelling spiders. Covered plots in the organic olive orchard were compared with uncovered plots where the covers had been removed mechanically....