BACKGROUND Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing access to more of the total available resources. Thus, understanding phenotypic attributes that allow species to partition resources is fundamentally important to explaining diversity-productivity relationships. METHO...

A cornerstone of upgrading productivity of tilapia culture is the continuous improvement in the quality of seed used by farmers. This statement is relevant to the spectrum of tilapia production systems, but ‘quality’ is subjective and requires to be defined for specific contexts. An overview of strategies to improve the quality of seed under different conditions is presented. Consumer, marketin...

Phenotypic correlation coefficients and heritability of the characters controlling seed yield of long-raceme forms of alfalfa was determined. It was found that seed yield per plant, which was positively correlated with 10 out of 12 analysed characters, depended upon the number of pods per raceme and the number of seeds per pod. Variability of these characters determined about 60% of the variabi...

Species coexistence and local-scale species richness are limited by the availability of seeds and microsites for germination and establishment. We conducted a seed addition experiment in seminatural grassland at three sites in southern Switzerland and repeated the experiment in two successive years to evaluate various circumstances under which seed limitation and establishment success affect co...

Sorghum and millet are a very important source of food and farm income for smallholder farmers, which can be enhanced especially if linked to new markets. These two crops have been widely viewed as minor traditional crops in the Zambian food systems. The two crops were displaced by maize in the 1900s with the opening of the copper mines. However, they remain important food crops for semi-arid a...

Mechanically driven seed metering devices currently perform their function efficiently and are a good solution to the problem of metering rates as seed is planted, but there are many voids that could be filled with a substantial change to the metering process. Electronically controlled seed singulation devices can address many of the inefficiencies experienced in a mechanically driven seed mete...