Differences in nutrient-use efficiency have been attributed to differences in leaf habit. It has been suggested that evergreens, with their longer-lived leaves, and therefore longer nutrient retention, are more efficient than deciduous species in their use of nutrients. In tropical trees, however, leaf life span is not always a function of whole-tree deciduousness, leading to the proposal that ...

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effect of stocking density on growing-meat quail performance (experiment I) and the effect of dietary crude protein (CP) levels and stocking density on growth performance, nutrient retention, blood metabolites, and carcass weight of growing-meat quails under high ambient temperature (experiment II). Three hundred and eighty male growing-meat quails...

Agriculture in the humid tropics is mostly limited by low soil fertility and invasion of weeds. The nutrient retention capacity of most soils is low and applied mineral fertilizers are rapidly leached into subsoil. Small farmers can not afford continuous mineral fertilizer input to compensate for the losses. Hence the dominating agricultural praxis is shifting cultivation accompanied with slash...

Nutrient loading to coastal bay ecosystems is of a similar magnitude as that to deeper, river-fed estuaries, yet our understanding of the eutrophication process in these shallow systems lags far behind. In this synthesis, we focus on one type of biotic feedback that influences eutrophication patterns in coastal bays—the important role of primary producers in the ‘coastal filter’. We discuss the...

Ecosystem analysis has established nutrient cycling as an important area of ecology involving biological, chemical, and geological interactions. Studying the flow of elements through ecosystems provides us with a tool for understanding the functioning of ecosystems. For example, if an ecosystem component has a rapid flux of elements through it, or if it stores large amounts of an element, that ...

Introduction Aquatic ecosystems have been fertile ground for understanding the extent to which animals can alter nutrient cycling. Although animals have been included in ecosystem models for years (for example, Teal, 1962), it is only more recently that investigators have looked at animals, either as individuals, single species, or assemblages, as agents regulating nutrient cycling (Kitchell et...

In the past, a major challenge for nutrition research was in defining indicators of nutritional adequacy. More recently, the research base related to the role of nutrition in chronic disease has expanded sufficiently to permit moving beyond deficiency indicators to other indicators with broader functional significance. Thus, nutrition research is faced with the new challenge of defining 'optima...

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate potato protein (PP, experiment 1) and refined PP (RPP, experiment 2) obtained from Gogu valley tubers as an antimicrobial agent in broiler diets. In both the experiments, 1-d-old male Ross 308 chicks were allotted to 5 treatments and performance, nutrient retention, and microbial populations in excreta and cecum were studied. Dietary treatments were as...

A feeding trial was conducted to investigate the effect of dietary supplementation of Bacillus subtilis LS 1-2 grown on citrus-juice waste and corn-soybean substrate on growth performance, nutrient retention, caecal microbial population and intestinal morphology in broilers. Three hundred twenty d-old Ross chicks were randomly allotted to 4 treatments on the basis of BW in a randomized complete...