In recent years, both airborne and terrestrial laser scanning developed to a standard technique for acquiring information on terrestrial landscapes. Here forest inventory and orchard management is considered. Inventory and parameterization of individual trees in orchards and forests are of large interest in nowadays society because of the potential of economical maximization of orchard producti...

Consider in R2 the standard lattice L = Z×Z and the origin (0,0). A point (m,n) ∈ L−{(0,0)} is said to be visible if the segment connecting the origin and (m,n) does not contain any other lattice points. Visibility problems have been studied since a century. Perhaps the most celebrated problems are the visible version of Gauss circle problem and the so-called orchard problem (see other problems...

Effect of the fungicide tetraconazole on microbial community in silt loam soils from orchard with long history of triazole application and from grassland with no known history of fungicide usage was investigated. Triazole tetraconazole that had never been used on these soils before was applied at the field rate and at tenfold the FR. Response of microbial communities to tetraconazole was invest...

Concentration of organic chlorinated pesticides (OCPs) were measured in topsoils of a selected farm (NK farm) in Beijing in 1993 and 2003. The results indicated that OCPs, mainly 1,2,3,4,5,6-hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) and 1,1,1,-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl) ethane (DDT), degraded greatly in the 20 years after the prohibition of their use. DDT was the major contributors of pollution on the...

This study shows that disturbance caused by cover-crop removal (CCR) in an organic olive orchard affects ground-spider populations. The effect of CCR on various organic olive-orchard plots was assessed by monitoring the abundance and diversity of ground-dwelling spiders. Covered plots in the organic olive orchard were compared with uncovered plots where the covers had been removed mechanically....

Carotenoids produce the brilliant red, orange, and yellow colors of many animals. However, melanin pigments can also confer some of these same hues. Because carotenoid and melanin colors are produced in different ways and may serve different signaling functions, either within or between species, it is important to establish whether one or both types of pigment are responsible for coloration. We...

Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot threatened by habitat loss, which is detrimental to the future survival of forest-dwelling herpetofauna. For conservation purposes, it is essential to determine how species respond to different types of anthropogenic habitat alteration. We conducted standardized field surveys (a variation of visual encounter survey) to assess species richness, abundance and ...

Orchard workers in north China are highly exposed to orchard pollens, especially peach and other Rosaceae family pollens during pollination season. The aim of this study was to investigate whether occupational allergy to peach tree pollen as a member of Rosaceae family is IgE-mediated and to evaluate the cross-reactivity among Rosaceae family pollens. Allergen skin test and conjunctival challen...

Information gathering and processing in horticulture helps optimise control processes and can enable more precise farm management. Robotics and automation are helping make high resolution, timely, farm wide measurements for tasks such as yield estimation, crop health and soil analysis. An efficient means of storing and processing such information is to discretise it to individual trees. To auto...

The blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria (Say), is a solitary bee that is an excellent pollinator of tree fruit orchards. Due to the annual rising costs of honey bee hive rentals, many orchardists are eager to develop management tools and practices to support O. lignaria as an alternative pollinator. Establishing O. lignaria pollination as a sustainable industry requires careful consideration of bo...