Abstract Unlike field crops where the cultural practices of raising seed are mostly similar to commercial crops, in case vegetables, not only grown for a much longer duration than raised vegetable purpose, they often also have critical requirements photoperiods, temperatures, humidity and precipitation. Moreover, compared most seeds considered high value low volume, hence these require specific...

We use seed count data from a New Zealand mono-specific mountain beech forest to test for decadal trends in seed production along an elevation gradient in relation to changes in climate. Seedfall was collected (1965 to 2009) from seed trays located on transect lines at fixed elevations along an elevation gradient (1020 to 1370 m). We counted the number of seeds in the catch of each tray, for ea...

Beans (Phase()las valgtais L.) often respond to N fertilization; however, N fertilization is not practiced for maximum seed production in southern Idaho. This suggests that the symbiotic relationship and/or soil N sources can provide most of the N needed by this legume. Our objective was to evaluate the relative contribution of the symbiotic-nonsymbiotic N sources by studying the effects of N f...

Artificially increasing pollen supply (supplemental mass pollination (SMP)) to conifer seed orchards has the potential to increase seed yields and improve the genetic worth of seed crops that would otherwise suffer from the detrimental effects of pollen contamination and unbalanced paternal contribution. However, success rates, measured as the proportion of seed fertilized by SMP, have been low...

Lignocellulosic biomass is a potential feedstock for production of sugars, which can be fermented into ethanol. The work presented in this thesis proposes some solutions to overcome problems with suboptimal process performance due to elevated cultivation temperatures and inhibitors present during ethanol production from lignocellulosic materials. In particular, continuous processes operated at ...

in this study, several artificial neural networks (anns) were developed to estimate seed and grain corn yields in parsabad moghan, iran. the data was collected by a face-to-face interview method from 144 corn farms during 2011. the energy ratios for seed and grain corns were calculated as 0.89 and 2.65, respectively. several multilayer perceptron anns with six neurons in the input layer and one...

Plant hydro-actuated systems provide a rich source of inspiration for designing autonomously morphing devices. One such example, the pentagonal ice plant seed capsule, achieves complex mechanical actuation which is critically dependent on its hierarchical organization. The functional core of this actuation system involves the controlled expansion of a highly swellable cellulosic layer, which is...

Previous studies demonstrated the effects of polyploidy on various aspects of plant life. It is, however, difficult to determine which plant characteristics are responsible for fitness differences between cytotypes. We assessed the relationship between polyploidy and seed production. To separate the effects of flowering phenology, flower head size and herbivores from other possible causes, we c...

Potato is one of the staple crops cultivated in upland farming in Japan and is propagated vegetatively by means of tubers. However once infected with diseases, potato yield decreases significantly. And one seed potato can produce approximately only 10 potato tubers. To improve the production system of seed potatoes in Japan, Japanese government established a three-stage propagation system for t...