Parthenium hysterophorus L., (Asteraceae) commonly known as parthenium weed, is a highly invasive plant that has become a problematic weed of pasture lands in Australia and many other countries around the world. For the management of this weed, an integrated approach comprising biological control and plant competition strategies was tested in southern central Queensland. Two competitive pasture...

Invasive plants reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services required by society, alter ecological processes, and can displace desirable species. They can reduce wildlife habitat quality, riparian area integrity, rangeland economic value, and enterprise net returns. The invasion process is regulated by characteristics of the invading plant and the community being invaded. The...

Agricultural intensification is critical to meet global food demand, but intensification threatens native species and degrades ecosystems. Sustainable intensification (SI) is heralded as a new approach for enabling growth in agriculture while minimizing environmental impacts. However, the SI literature has overlooked a major environmental risk. Using data from eight countries on six continents,...

Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms is a free-floating aquatic macrophyte growing normally to a height of 0.5 m to 1 m. This weed causes, substantial economic and ecological harm, warranting its removal, lest the impacts of the weed should become permanent. From an ecological perspective, the most effective, management approach is to make use of the weed for various purposes. The present study o...

Article history: Received 9 April 2014 Accepted 8 October 2014 Available online 9 November 2014 This paper presents efficient chaotic invasive weed optimization (CIWO) techniques based on chaos for solving optimal power flow (OPF) problems with non-smooth generator fuel cost functions (non-smooth OPF) with the minimum pollution level (environmental OPF) in electric power systems. OPF problem is...

We design a control system for a prosthesis test robot that was previously developed for transfemoral prosthesis design and test. The robot’s control system aims to mimic human walking in the sagittal plane. It has been seen in previous work that trajectory control fails to produce human-like forces. Therefore, we utilize an impedance controller to achieve reasonable tracking of motion and forc...

Seed germination is the key step for successful establishment, growth and further expansion of population especially for alien plants with annual life cycle. Traits like better adaptability and germination response were thought to be associated with plant invasion. However, there are not enough empirical studies correlating adaptation to environmental factors with germination response of alien ...

426 BioScience • May 2008 / Vol. 58 No. 5 www.biosciencemag.org T impact of introduced, invasive species on communities and ecosystems is one of today’s most pressing global environmental problems (Wilcove et al. 1998, Mack et al. 2000). Biological invasions are a leading cause of extinction and biodiversity loss (Wilcove et al. 1998), and invasive plants are permanently altering natural commun...

Nature in cities is concentrated in urban green spaces, which are key areas for urban biodiversity and also important areas to connect people with nature. To conserve urban biodiversity within these natural refugia, habitat restoration such as weed control and revegetation is often implemented. These actions are expected to benefit biodiversity, although species known to be affected by urbaniza...

We report the 3.16 Mb draft genome of Acinetobacter sp. strain BMW17, a Gram-negative bacterium in the class of Gammaproteobacteria, isolated from the rhizospheric region of Phragmites karka, an invasive weed in Chilika Lake, Odisha, India. The strain BMW17(T) is capable of degrading cellulose and is also an efficient plant growth promoter that can be useful for various phytoremedial and commer...