1. House mouse Mus domesticus outbreaks in the grain-growing areas of south-eastern Australia occur irregularly and may be local or widespread, covering thousands of square kilometres. All natural and agricultural habitats are occupied when house mouse numbers are high, and the question we addressed was whether we can distinguish source and sink habitats within these agricultural landscapes so ...

Our main observation concerns closed geodesics on surfaces M with a smooth Finsler metric, i.e. a function F : TM → [0,∞) which is a norm on each tangent space TpM , p ∈ M , which is smooth outside of the zero section in TM , and which is strictly convex in the sense that Hess(F ) is positive definite on TpM \ {0}. One calls a Finsler metric F symmetric if F (p,−v) = F (p, v) for all v ∈ TpM . ...

Tolerance to abiotic stress is an important agronomic trait in crops and is controlled by many genes, which are called quantitative trait loci (QTLs). Identification of these QTLs will contribute not only to the understanding of plant biology but also for plant breeding, to achieve stable crop production around the world. Previously, we mapped three QTLs controlling low-temperature tolerance at...

Residue management in cropping systems is useful to improve soil quality. However, the studies on the effects of residue management on methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emission from paddy field in southern China are few. Therefore, the emissions of CH4 and N2O were investigated in double cropping rice (Oryza sativa L.) systems with different winter covering crops using the static chamber-g...