Monitoring crop condition and production estimates at the state and county level is of great interest to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts field interviews with sampled farm operators and obtains crop cuttings to make crop yield estimates at regional and state levels. NASS needs supplemental sp...

The future of biodiversity and ecosystem services hinges on harmonizing agricultural production and conservation, yet there is no planning algorithm for predicting the efficacy of conservation investments in farmland. We present a conservation planning framework for countryside (working agricultural landscapes) that calculates the production and conservation benefits to the current baseline of ...

The paper describes how stochastic optimization techniques can be used to model profit maximizing producer behaviour in a spatial continuum. The main methodological issues to be addressed are, first, that the representation of optimal allocations in a spatial continuum naturally leads to models that contain integrals over space, and the second that the resulting model tends to have a multi-leve...

Pesticides are regulated in Europe and this process includes an environmental risk assessment (ERA) for non-target arthropods (NTA). Traditionally a non-spatial or field trial assessment is used. In this study we exemplify the introduction of a spatial context to the ERA as well as suggest a way in which the results of complex models, necessary for proper inclusion of spatial aspects in the ERA...

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) is one of the important oilseed crops in the world. The crop has been traditionally grown for its flowers as a source of dye for colouring food and fabrics. Safflower oil has highest content of linoleic acid (75%). India with an area of 2.71 lakh ha, production of 1.71 lakh tonnes of seed and average productivity of 632 kg/ha is the leading producer of safflo...

BACKGROUND Larval control is of paramount importance in the reduction of malaria vector abundance and subsequent disease transmission reduction. Understanding larval habitat succession and its ecology in different land use managements and cropping systems can give an insight for effective larval source management practices. This study investigated larval habitat succession and ecological parame...

Field studies that address the production of lignocellulosic biomass as a source of renewable energy provide critical data for the development of bioenergy crop models. A literature survey revealed that 14 models have been used for simulating bioenergy crops including herbaceous and woody bioenergy crops, and for crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) crops. These models simulate field-scale produc...