1. Ecosystem services to agriculture, such as pollination, rely on natural areas adjacent to farmland to support organisms that provide services. Native insect pollinators depend on natural or semi-natural land surrounding farms for nesting and alternative foraging resources. Despite interest in conserving pollinators through habitat restoration, the scale at which land use affects pollinators ...

The paper introduced a metadata based Agricultural scientific and technical Information fusion and Services framework. Through Agricultural scientific and technical Information dataset core metadata and Services core metadata, the distributed and platform-independent Information fusion can be implemented, based on the information fused resources in base layer of the framework, many applications...

Agricultural Extension services are among the most important rural services in developing countries. The services are considered to be a key driver of technological change and productivity growth in agriculture. In Kenya, like in the rest of the developing economies, agricultural extension has largely been delivered through supply–driven approaches. Due to perceived low impact of agricultural e...

In recent years there has been much interest in alternative sources of income for farmers. This is because economic theory suggests that demand for agricultural commodities is inelastic so that, as incomes in society as a whole increase, those of farmers do not necessarily keep pace Ð hence the current problems with falling real farm incomes. In contrast the demand for services is relatively el...

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining more momentum with the advent of network services on the Web. A programmable and machine accessible Web is the vision of many and might represent a step towards the semantic Web. This paper reflects upon existing Web services implementations and presents an abstract containment model as a basis to model Web services. A common model for Web services...

This paper reports on comparisons of Web Service, Java RMI, and CORBA solutions for example applications. Performance problems, identified in earlier studies of Web Services, have been significantly reduced in the current implementations. The newer Web Service APIs realize a model that has significant overlaps with distributed object technologies, allowing in some cases for the use of a common ...

Many of the most nutritionally and economically important edible insects are those that are harvested from existing agricultural systems. Current strategies of agricultural intensification focus predominantly on increasing crop yields, with no or little consideration of the repercussions this may have for the additional harvest and ecology of accompanying food insects. Yet such insects provide ...

Abstract Background In recognition of the potential importance road access in provision and request for agricultural extension services, this study investigates whether to what extent paved roads would influence farmers’ using a nationally representative sample households communities Malawi. Our proposes an measure that reflects diversity topics service providers available village where farmers...