Publications by authors named "F J Hayes"

Article Synopsis
  • Tropospheric ozone (O) is harmful to plants, and traditional detection of O-induced damage mostly involves manual checks of leaves.
  • This study explored the use of hyperspectral leaf reflectance to identify O stress in various tree saplings by analyzing how their reflectance changed under different ozone exposure levels.
  • A new Ozone Damage Index (OzDI) was developed, which effectively correlates reflectance data to ozone damage, showing that hyperspectral methods could provide a more efficient way to monitor O damage in broadleaf species compared to existing methods.
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Air quality negatively impacts agriculture, reducing the yield of staple food crops. While measured data on African ground-level ozone levels are scarce, experimental studies demonstrate the damaging impact of ozone on crops. Common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), an ozone-sensitive crop, are widely grown in Uganda.

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Conserving Earth's most rapidly changing biomes necessitates understanding biological consequences of altered climes. Past species- and taxa-level responses to warming environs include numerous concentrated extirpations at the southern peripheries of distributions during the late Pleistocene. Less clear are localized capacities of cold-adapted species to mitigate thermal challenges against warming temperatures, especially through proximate behavioral and physiological adjustments.

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The interaction between nitrogen storage and translocation, senescence, and late phase photosynthesis is critical to the post-anthesis grain fill period in wheat, but ozone's effect on nitrogen dynamics within the wheat plant is not well understood. This study used solardomes to expose a widely grown elite spring wheat cultivar, cv. Skyfall, to four levels of ozone (30 ppb, 45 ppb, 70 ppb, 85 ppb) for 11 weeks, with two levels of nitrogen fertilization, 140 kg ha and 160 kg ha, the higher rate including an additional 20 kg N ha at anthesis.

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Tropospheric ozone (O3 ) is a global air pollutant that adversely affects plant growth. Whereas the impacts of O3 have previously been examined for some tropical commodity crops, no information is available for the pantropical crop, banana (Musa spp.).

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