Koa (Acacia koa A. Gray) is an endemic Hawaiian hardwood tree of high ecological, cultural and economic value. Despite its multiple values, research on the silviculture of koa has been minimal until recently because the preferred land-use was pasture for livestock, and logging was done mainly to facilitate and reduce the costs of conversion. This study examined growth response of selected poten...

The geometric features of agricultural trees such as canopy area, tree height and crown volume provide useful information about plantation status and crop production. However, these variables are mostly estimated after a time-consuming and hard field work and applying equations that treat the trees as geometric solids, which produce inconsistent results. As an alternative, this work presents an...

In plants, carbon source-sink relationships are assumed to affect their reproductive effort. In fruit trees, carbon source-sink relationships are likely to be involved in their fruiting behavior. In apple, a large variability in fruiting behaviors exists, from regular to biennial, which has been related to the within-tree synchronization vs desynchronization of floral induction in buds. In this...

In recent years, Nigeria witnessed significant labour migration coupled with reduction in rural agricultural productivity. Youths abandoned farms for ventures with high returns and less drudgery in cities thus labour availability in peak agricultural seasons became scarce. The declining farm population constituting mostly women and old men are not capable of producing sufficient food for the no...

The work focuses on developing a classification tree approach for in-season crop mapping during early summer, by integrating optical (Landsat 8 OLI) and X-band SAR (COSMO-SkyMed) data acquired over a test site in Northern Italy. The approach is based on a classification tree scheme fed with a set of synoptic seasonal features (minimum, maximum and average, computed over the multi-temporal datas...

The strategic management of agricultural lands involves crop field monitoring each year. Crop discrimination via remote sensing is a complex task, especially if different crops have a similar spectral response and cropping pattern. In such cases, crop identification could be improved by combining object-based image analysis and advanced machine learning methods. In this investigation, we evalua...

Studies of zoochorous seed dispersal systems often consider crop size, yet seldom consider the kinds and amounts of fruits surrounding parent plants (the fruit neighborhood) when attempting to explain among-plant variation in fruit removal. We studied avian frugivory at 24 Schefflera morototoni trees from February to May 1998 in central Puerto Rico. The number of fruits removed by avian seed di...