Drought stress is the main abiotic factor affecting rice production. Rain-fed upland rice which is grown on unbounded fields and totally dependent on rainfall for moisture is more prone to drought stress compared to rice from other ecosystems. However, upland rice has adapted to this limited water condition, thus are more drought tolerant than rice from other ecosystems. We performed the first ...

We compared small mammal communities between riparian (stream corridor) and nearby upland habitats in a hardwood forest ecosystem on Fort A.P. Hill, Caroline County, Virginia. We used a combination of small-scale drift fence/pitfall trap arrays and snap traps to capture small mammals during April October 1998, with an additional winter sample in January 1999. We captured seven small mammal spec...

Significant advances in upland erosion modeling have been achieved in the past decade. The TREX (Two-dimensional Runoff, Erosion, and Export) watershed model has been developed at Colorado State University for the simulation of surface runoff from spatially and temporally distributed rainstorms on watersheds. The model has been applied in several countries with different climatic conditions. TR...

Livestock grazing can be used as a key management tool for maintaining healthy ecosystems. However, the effectiveness of using grazing to modify habitat for species of conservation concern depends on how the grazing regime is implemented. Timing of grazing is one grazing regime component that is less understood than grazing intensity and grazer identity, but is predicted to have important impli...

The tidal marshes of North America are home to a diverse collection of morphologically differentiated reptiles, birds, and mammals. We reviewed the existing molecular studies on endemic tidal-marsh vertebrates, including turtles, snakes, sparrows, rails, shrews, and rodents. We found both deep and shallow divergences from their nearest upland relatives in all geographic regions. In the Northeas...

Twelve species of Ansonia occur on the Thai-Malay peninsula, of which, five from Peninsular Malaysia, form a monophyletic group. One of these, A. jeetsukumarani, is endemic to the Titiwangsa Mountain Range, in which, we discovered a new population of Ansonia that is not A. jeetsukumarani or even its closest relative. Based on morphology, color pattern, and molecular phylogenetic analyses using ...

Since 1997, highly pathogenic avian influenza subtype H5N1 has emerged to cause severe disease in humans in over 15 countries. Humans who have regular contact with poultry or wild birds may be at greater risk of infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza and other zoonotic avian diseases. To develop preventative measures for transmission of avian influenza to high-risk human populations i...

We have developed a mass balance analysis of organic carbon (OC) across the five major river subsystems of the Mississippi (MS) Basin (an area of 3.2 3 106 km2). This largely agricultural landscape undergoes a bulk soil erosion rate of ;480 t·km22·yr21 (;1500 3 106 t/yr, across the MS Basin), and a soil organic carbon (SOC) erosion rate of ;7 t·km22·yr21 (;22 3 106 t/yr). Erosion translocates u...

295 Semi dry rice refers to rice which is sown on dry seed bed as an upland crop taking advantage of monsoon rains. At fourth or fifth leaf stage, when the rainfall intensifies or sufficient water is released from the tank or irrigation projects, the field is converted to wet land rice. The major barrier in improving the productivity of rice in this system is inefficient use of important plant ...

BACKGROUND Upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L., is one of the world's most important economic crops. In the absence of the entire genomic sequence, a large number of expressed sequence tag (EST) resources of upland cotton have been generated and used in several studies. However, information about the flower development of this species is rare. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To clarify the mo...