Reports of positive or neutral effects of grazing on plant species richness have prompted calls for livestock grazing to be used as a tool for managing land for conservation. Grazing effects, however, are likely to vary among different response variables, types, and intensity of grazing, and across abiotic conditions. We aimed to examine how grazing affects ecosystem structure, function, and co...

It has been suggested that enrichment of atmospheric CO2 should alter mycorrhizal function by simultaneously increasing nutrient-uptake benefits and decreasing net C costs for host plants. However, this hypothesis has not been sufficiently tested. We conducted three experiments to examine the impacts of CO2 enrichment on the function of different combinations of plants and arbuscular mycorrhiza...

An unknown linear plant will track an input command signal if the plant is driven by a controller whose transfer function approximates the inverse of the plant transfer function. An adaptive inverse identification process can be used to obtain a stable controller, even if the plant is nonminimum phase. A model-reference version of this idea allows system dynamics to closely approximate desired ...

in the open-pit mining, one of the first decisions that must be made in production planning stage, after completing the design of final pit limits, is determining of the processing plant cut-off grade. since this grade has an essential effect on operations, choosing the optimum cut-off grade is of considerable importance. different goals may be used for determining optimum cut-off grade. one of...

the conversion process of heavy hydrocarbons to the valuable products such as gasoline is an important operation in the oil refineries.one important process is the “fluidized catalytic cracking” (fcc).feed injection in fcc process has an important role in the selectivity and properties of the products.performance of the feed injection system is dependent on the atomizers.the size and contributi...

A general theory of allometric scaling that predicts how the proportions of vascular plants and the characteristics of plant communities change or scale with plant size is outlined. The theory rests, in part, on the assumptions of (1) minimal energy dissipation in the transport of fluid through space-filling, fractal-like, branching vascular networks; and (2) the absence of scaling with plant s...

A plant can track an input command signal if it is driven by a controller whose transfer function approximates the inverse of its transfer function. A stable inverse can be obtained even if the plant is nonminimum-phase. No direct feedback is used, except that the plant output is monitored and utilized to adapt the parameters of the controller. A model-reference inverse control system can learn...

Encouraging more students to embrace plant science research is a global priority. We have evolved a second year undergraduate course from a standard lecture/practical format into an innovative research-led learning design that gives students hands-on experience of cutting-edge plant science research and specialist instrumentation. By making tangible the links between plant genetics, biochemistr...