Pesticides used in agriculture may cause adverse health effects among the population living near agricultural areas. However, identifying the populations most likely to be exposed is difficult. We conducted a feasibility study to determine whether satellite imagery could be used to reconstruct historical crop patterns. We used historical Farm Service Agency records as a source of ground referen...

Crop rotation has been practiced for centuries in an effort to improve agricultural yield. However, the directions, magnitudes, and mechanisms of the yield effects of various crop rotations remain poorly understood in many systems. In order to better understand how crop rotation influences cotton yield, we used hierarchical Bayesian models to analyze a large ecoinformatics database consisting o...

Precision Farming (PF) management strategies are commonly based on estimations of within-field yield potential, often derived from remotely-sensed products, e.g., Vegetation Index (VI) maps. These well-established means, however, lack important information, like crop height. Combinations of VI-maps and detailed 3D Crop Surface Models (CSMs) enable advanced methods for crop yield prediction. Thi...

Neurons in the visual cortex of all examined mammals exhibit orientation or direction tuning. New imaging techniques are allowing the circuit mechanisms underlying orientation and direction selectivity to be studied with clarity that was not possible a decade ago. However, these new techniques bring new challenges: robust quantitative measurements are needed to evaluate the findings from these ...

The USDA established the National Organic Program (NOP) to develop national standards for organically produced agricultural products and establish an organic certification program as required by the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) passed by Congress in 1990. Organic crop production excludes conventional pesticides, petroleum – based fertilizers, and sewage sludge based fertilizers with some...

Primary visual cortex (V1) is the site at which orientation selectivity emerges in mammals: visual thalamus afferents to V1 respond equally to all stimulus orientations, whereas their target V1 neurons respond selectively to stimulus orientation. The emergence of orientation selectivity in V1 has long served as a model for investigating cortical computation. Recent evidence for orientation sele...

Soybean stubble is a potentially significant residue of a crop that has attained prominence as an important cash crop, high value food crop, and also as a soil ameliorative. Soybean culture in Australia is a fledgeling yet emerging industry with crop area totalling 68,000 ha in the 1983/84 season with some 80 percent of the crop grown in subtropical regions (Desborough et al. 1984). The potenti...

Multiple mechanisms have been shown to shape frequency-modulated (FM) selectivity within the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus (IC) in the pallid bat. In this study we focus on the mechanisms associated with sideband inhibition. The relative arrival time of inhibition compared with excitation can be used to predict FM responses as measured with a two-tone inhibition paradigm. An early-...

Maize and Indian mustard are significant crops in semi-arid climate zones of India. Improved water management requires precise scheduling of irrigation, which in turn requires an accurate computation of daily crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Daily crop evapotranspiration comes as a product of reference evapotranspiration (ET0) and the growth stage specific crop coefficients modified for daily var...