Phenology is a key aspect of plant success. Recent research has demonstrated that herbarium specimens can provide important information on plant phenology. Massive digitization efforts have the potential to greatly expand herbarium-based phenological research, but also pose a serious challenge regarding efficient data collection. Here, we introduce CrowdCurio, a crowdsourcing tool for the colle...

Phenology offers critical insights into the responses of species to climate change; shifts in species' phenologies can result in disruptions to the ecosystem processes and services upon which human livelihood depends. To better detect such shifts, scientists need long-term phenological records covering many taxa and across a broad geographic distribution. To date, phenological observation effor...

Thymus hyemalis L. and Spanish Thymus vulgaris L. shrubs are characterized by a large chemical intraspecific variability among he plants. This fact makes it difficult to detect real changes occurring in their essential oil composition during the vegetative cycle. ased on this, the clones of T. hyemalis and Spanish T. vulgaris were used in this present work to monitor seasonal variations in the ...

Botryosphaeria dieback is a fungal grapevine trunk disease that currently represents a threat for viticulture worldwide because of the important economical losses due to reduced yield of affected plants and their premature death. Neofusicoccum parvum and Diplodia seriata are among the causal agents. Vine green stems were artificially infected with N. parvum or D. seriata at the onset of three d...

Biotrophic fungal pathogens are expected to have adapted to their host plants for phenological synchrony, to optimize the possibility of contacts leading to infections. We investigated the patterns and causes of variation in phenological synchrony in the oak-powdery mildew pathosystem, a major disease in natural ecosystems. The study was carried out along an altitudinal gradient, representing a...

In the rangelands of Iran, the lack of appropriate grazing management is one of the major problems ultimately leading to untimely and excessive grazing intensity of forage. Accordingly, most of the rangelands show a retrogression trend and poor conditions. In forage species, phenological stage is one of the most important criteria for range management. Bromus tomentellus species is an ...

Knowledge on habitat characteristics and nature of regional vegetation inrangelands is a prerequisite for any planning and proper range management along withsustainable development of renewable natural resources. Rangelands in southern andwestern highlands of Kashan, Iran are of good vegetation diversity but unfortunately,palatable and desirable species are endangered in recent years. This rese...

Spread of soil-borne fungal plant pathogens is mainly driven by the amount of resources the pathogen is able to capture and exploit should it behave either as a saprotroph or a parasite. Despite their importance in understanding the fungal spread in agricultural ecosystems, experimental data related to exploitation of infected host plants by the pathogen remain scarce. Using Rhizoctonia solani ...

Sunflower plants were grown on soil contaminated with several levels of Cd (from 0.3 to 15 mg Cd kg/soil). Cd and nutrient (Cu, Zn, Fe, Ca, K, Mg) contents were evaluated in root and aboveground biomass during the vegetative growth period (from the emergence of the cotyledon leaves to the flower bud phase). An overall increase of Cd content was found in the plants during the growing cycle. Sign...

the flowering phase of apple trees is the most critical step in relation with low temperatures and frost events. therefore, forecasting the time of flowering is important. if a model can predict the exact time of flowering, it would be feasible to care for flowers agianst late spring freezing (lsf). in this study, we evaluated three temperature-base chilling models namely: chilling hours (ch), ...