Time study is an important research tool used in comparing productivity of forest harvesting systems across varying conditions. Unfortunately, it has been an expensive tool to apply, involving travel and fieldwork by a crew of technicians plus time in the office to reduce raw data to usable information. In the interests of safety and cost reduction, it would be preferable to have a means of per...

The effect of temporary straw bedding for a period of 6, 4, or 2 weeks before slaughter was studied on pigs’ performance, behaviour, cortisol concentration, intermediary metabolism, and meat quality. Pigs were barren housed on slatted concrete floors during growth and allocated to one of following four treatments (T): straw bedding during 6 weeks (6wk), 4 weeks (4wk), 2 weeks (2wk) before slaug...

Soil apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) has been used as a surrogate measure for such soil properties as salinity, moisture content, topsoil depth (TD), and clay content. Measurements of ECa can be accomplished with commercially available sensors and can be used to efficiently and inexpensively develop the dense datasets desirable for describing within-field spatial variability in precision...

Forest management decisions are often based on long-range projections of future forest conditions. These conditions and effects can be complex and difficult to understand for those not trained or experienced in forest management. Modern computer-based environmental data visualization systems have been found to be of considerable assistance in this context. Cost effective computer visualization ...

Adverse reactions of the domestic horse to environmental stimuli can be problematic in training and management. Hesitation and alarm reactions to visual features of the ground can occur in both ridden work and when handling horses. To assess the effect of one visual feature (colour) on the behaviour of the domestic horse, the reactions of 16 riding horses to 8 different coloured mats were recor...

Plant species present a complex array of biochemicals to herbivores that in conjunction with a plant’s physical structure influence intake. Our objective was to determine the role of postingesŽ . tive feedback from macronutrients on the ingestion of a low-quality forage by sheep OÕis aries . We compared the ingestive behaviour of two groups of lambs conditioned with intraruminal Ž . Ž . infusio...

In recent years, the use of airborne lidar technology to measure forest biophysical characteristics has been rapidly increasing. This paper discusses processing algorithms for deriving the terrain model and estimating tree heights by using a multiple return, high / density, small-footprint lidar data set. The lidar data were acquired over deciduous, coniferous, and mixed stands of varying age c...

It is proved that any protocol that constructs a reliable data link service using an unreliable physical channel service necessarily includes in the packets some header information that enables the protocol to treat different packets differently. The physical channel considered is permitted to lose, but not reorder or duplicate packets. The formal framework used for the proof is the I/O automat...

A compact airborne spectrographic imager (CASI) was used to obtain images over a field that had been set up to study the effects of various nitrogen application rates and weed control on corn (Zea mays ). The objective was to determine to what extent the reflectances obtained in the 72 visible and near-infrared (NIR) wavebands (from 409 to 947 nm) might be related to differences associated with...

In many applied precision farming applications, remotely sensed survey data are collected specifically because these data correlate well with some soil property of interest. Additionally, a general model for the functional relationship between the soil property and the sensor data is often known a priori, but the exact parameter estimates associated with the model must still be determined via s...