This paper reviews the current and potential methods to control the harlequin ladybird, Harmonia axyridis (Pallas) (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), an Asian predatory beetle invasive in Europe and the Americas where it has become a human nuisance, a grape and wine pest and a threat to native biodiversity. Current methods to manage this invasive species include: techniques to mechanically prevent ad...

In order to use persistence diagrams as a true statistical tool, it would be very useful to have a good notion of mean and variance for a set of diagrams. In [21], Mileyko and his collaborators made the first study of the properties of the Fréchet mean in (Dp,Wp), the space of persistence diagrams equipped with the p-th Wasserstein metric. In particular, they showed that the Fréchet mean of a f...

arabis mosaic virus (armv) belongs to the plant virus genus nepovirus in the family secoviridae. armv is transmitted by several species of the nematode vector in genus xiphinema, and has a very wide natural host range in crop plants and ornamentals.  the objective of this study was to determine the distribution of armv in the vineyards and rose plantations in western and eastern azarbaijan prov...

Symptomatic grapevine samples were collected from vineyards in Zanjan province to detect Grapevine virus A. Total RNA was extracted from symptomatic leaf samples and subjected to cDNA synthesis using random hexamer primers. Then, a DNA fragment around 800 bp including the complete coat protein (CP) gene was amplified from nine out of 57 samples by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using specific ...

1049-9644/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.biocontrol.2010.07.006 * Corresponding author. Present Address: Agricultur Cyprus. Fax: +357 22316770. E-mail address: [email protected] (M We studied the effects of temperatures from 10 to 40 C on development of the Pacific spider mite, Tetranychus pacificus (McGregor), and the Willamette spider mite, Eotetranychus w...

Increasing international trade and tourism have led to an increase in the introduction of exotic pests that pose a considerable economic threat to the agro-ecosystems of importing countries. Scale insects (Sternorryncha: Coccoidea) may be contaminants of export consignments from the South African deciduous fruit industry to the European Union, Israel, United Kingdom and the United States, for e...

Grafting, which involves combining two different varieties or species to form a plant with new characteristics, is a technique known from ancient times in tree fruit and grape production. It was, however, used in viticulture only for certain special cases: to change variety, increase vigor, or increase limestone tolerance. The principal reason for the increased use of grafting in viticulture wa...

A 3-yr field study was conducted at commercial grape (Vitis spp.) farms to evaluate insect management programs for control of the grape berry moth, Paralobesia viteana Clemens (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) and conservation of natural enemies. At each farm, one vineyard received only reduced-risk insecticides for control of second and third generation P. viteana, whereas the comparison vineyard rec...

Thirty-five strains of malolactic bacteria were isolated from grapes and alcoholic and malolactic fermentations in two vineyards from northwestern Spain. These belonged to six species of the genera Lactobacillus and Leuconostoc. The results of their partial enological characterization showed that 47.5% utilized more than 80% of the initial malic acid.

This dissertation extends the theory of persistent homology to time varying systems. Most of the previous work has been dedicated to using this powerful tool in topological data analysis to study static point clouds. In particular, given a point cloud, we can construct its persistence diagram. Since the diagram varies continuously as the point cloud varies continuously, we study the space of ti...