Search results for "Forestry"

Alternative nursery propagation for vineyards establishment

2016

Dead vines are often a problem present in many vineyards and are due to physiological or pathological causes whereby the vines need to be replaced. The aim of the trial was to create in the nursery plant material of four cultivars in order to easily replace the dead vines in the vineyards but also to anticipate the first harvest and to improve the vineyard uniformity and synchronize the vineyard management practices during the first two years of plantation. During the first year in the nursery, the effect of plant density on the percentage of success and vegetative growth was evaluated. During the second year, in the open field and only for one cultivar, the vegetative and reproductive para…

Will nutrient cycles in a tropical montane forest in Ecuador be affected by a changing element composition of rainfall?

2009

Organic Fertilization in Traditional Mediterranean Grapevine Orchards Mediates Changes in Soil Microbial Community Structure and Enhances Soil Fertil…

2016

Soil microbial populations and their functions related to nutrient cycling contribute substantially to the regulation of soil fertility and the sustainability of agroecosystems. A field experiment was performed to assess the medium-term effect of a mineral fertilizer and two organic fertilization systems with different nitrogen sources on the soil microbial community biomass, structure, and composition (phospholipid fatty acids, pattern, and abundance), microbial activity (basal respiration, dehydrogenase, protease, urease, β-glucosidase, and total amount of phosphomonoesterase activities), and physical (aggregate stability) and chemical (total organic C, total N, available P and water-solu…

Macrofungi as ecosystem resources: Conservation versus exploitation

2013

Fungi are organisms of significant importance not only for the crucial roles they undertake in nature but also for many human activities that are strictly dependent on them. Indeed, fungi possess fundamental positions in ecosystems functioning including nutrient cycles and wood decomposition. As concerns human-related activities, edible and non-edible mushrooms are also involved and/or exploited in forestry, pharmaceutical industry and food production; hence, nowadays they represent a major economic source worldwide. In order to maintain and improve their strategic importance, several conservation strategies, such as habitat preservation, are needed. This article reports several contributio…

Soil-Water Interactions Unveiled by Fast Field Cycling NMR Relaxometry

2017

Leaf life span and the mobility of "non-mobile" mineral nutrients - The case of boron in conifers

2002

Nutrient conservation is considered important for the adaptation of plants to infertile environments. The importance of leaf life spans in controlling mean residence time of nutrients in plants has usually been analyzed in relation to nutrients that can be retranslocated within the plant. Longer leaf life spans increase the mean residence time of all mineral nutrients, but for non-mobile nutrients long leaf life spans concurrently cause concentrations in tissues to increase with leaf age, and consequently may reduce non-mobile nutrient use efficiency. Here we analyze how the role of leaf life span is related to the mobility of nutrients within the plant. We use optimality concepts to derive…

Minor Losses and Best Manifold Position in the Optimal Design of Paired Sloped Drip Laterals

2018

Closure to “Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes” by Giorgio Baiamonte

2016

The author appreciates the interest of the discussers of the paper “Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes” and wants to express his gratitude to Joaquin Monserrat and Javier Barragan for the opportunity to discuss the issues they raised. In their discussion, they questioned the use of analytical relationships to derive the design variables that are required for the optimal design of paired sloped laterals. This paper detected the Best Manifold Position (BMP = 0.24) to design optimal paired laterals and, as the discussers mentioned, allows the methodology introduced by Baiamonte et al. (2015) to be applied. Thus, the issues they questioned and …

Explicit relationships for optimal designing rectangular microirrigation units on uniform slopes: The IRRILAB software application

2018

Abstract Many attempts have been made to provide easy tools for designing microirrigation units. However, most of these have dealt with numerical solutions, which require many trial-and-error attempts and time-consuming iterations, performed by applying the basic hydraulic equations from the manifold to the end of both the downhill and the uphill sides of the laterals. Recently, analytical procedures to optimally design paired drip laterals on uniform slopes were proposed, providing readily obtainable results and energy saving. Although these analytical solutions can be practically applied, they only make it possible to design a one-lateral unit; to be really interesting for practical appli…

Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes

2016

Microirrigation plants, if properly designed, allow water use efficiency to be optimized and quite high values of emission uniformity to be obtained in the field. It is known that disposing paired laterals, in which two distribution pipes extend in opposite directions from a common manifold, contribute to increasing water use efficiency. Recently, an analytical procedure has been proposed to optimally design paired drip laterals on uniform slopes under the assumption of neglect: (1) the variations of the emitters’ flow rate along the lateral, and (2) the local losses due to the emitters’ insertions. However, this procedure is not readily usable for every geometric and hydraulic characterist…