Agriculture of the inland arid region in Xinjiang depends on irrigation, which forms oasis of Northwest China. The production and water use of wheat, a dominant crop there, is significantly affected by undergoing climate variability and change. The objective of this study is to quantify inter-annual variability of wheat yield and water use from 1955 to 2006. The farming systems model APSIM (Agr...

This paper presents a method used in China Agriculture Remote Sensing Monitoring System (CHARMS) for automatically identifying crop planting areas and monitoring crop growth conditions at a large scale based on time-series of MODIS NDVI Datasets. In doing that, the characteristics of NDVI time series of spring wheat, spring maize, soybean and rice in Northeastern China were firstly analyzed to ...

Understanding crop phenology is fundamental to agricultural production, management, planning, and decision-making. This study used 250 m 16-day Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) time-series data to detect crop phenology across the Midwestern United States, 2007–2015. Key crop phenology metrics, start of season (SOS) and end of season (EOS), we...

Natural products have been used for thousands of years for the benefit of mankind, as important sources of food, clothing, cosmetics, building materials, tools, medicines and crop protection agents. They have made enormous contributions to human health through compounds such as quinine, morphine, aspirin (a natural product analog), digitoxin and many others. Researches in this field are becomin...

Anecdotal accounts regarding reduced US cropping system diversity have raised concerns about negative impacts of increasingly homogeneous cropping systems. However, formal analyses to document such changes are lacking. Using US Agriculture Census data, which are collected every five years, we quantified crop species diversity from 1978 to 2012, for the contiguous US on a county level basis. We ...

Crop residues are among the cellulosic feedstocks expected to provide renewable energy. The availability of crop species and residue availability varies across the United States. Estimates of harvestable residues must consider all the residues produced during the entire rotation. Inclusion of fallow or low residue producing crops requires that less feedstock be harvested. A re-occurring theme a...

BACKGROUND Cancer and chronic disease are leading causes of death in the US with an estimated cost of $46 billion. METHODS We analyzed 11 million cause-specific deaths of US workers age 18-64 years in 30 states during 1985-1999, 2003-2004, and 2007 by occupation, industry, race, gender, and Hispanic origin. RESULTS The highest significantly elevated proportionate leukemia mortality was obse...