Estimating plant biomass in agroecosystems using a drop-plate meter.

Reason For Doing The Work: Plant biomass is a commonly used metric to assess agricultural health and productivity. Removing plant material is the most accurate method to estimate plant biomass, but this approach is time consuming, labor intensive, and destructive. Previous attempts to use indirect methods to estimate plant biomass have been limited in breadth and/or have added complexity in data collection and/or modeling.

Moth community among apples during bloom in Northwest Arkansas: likely pollinators and activity periods.

Apples are a fruit crop of economic and nutritional importance that require cross-pollination primarily by insects for sustainable production. It was recently demonstrated that nocturnal pollinators can contribute as much to apple pollination as diurnal pollinators. However, information concerning nocturnal pollinator identity, activity periods, and community composition in apples is lacking, which limits research expansion.

Nocturnal Pollinators Significantly Contribute to Apple Production.

Agricultural dependency on insect-mediated pollination is increasing at the same time that pollinator populations are experiencing declines in diversity and abundance. Current pollinator research in agriculture focuses largely on diurnal pollinators, yet the evidence for pollination by moths and other nocturnal pollinators is growing. Apples are one of the most valuable and important fruits produced globally, and apple production is dependent on insect-mediated cross-pollination to generate a profitable crop.

Quantitative single-cell characterization of bacterial interactions reveals type VI secretion is a double-edged sword.

Interbacterial interaction pathways play an important role in defining the structure and complexity of bacterial associations. A quantitative description of such pathways offers promise for understanding the forces that contribute to community composition. We developed time-lapse fluorescence microscopy methods for quantitation of interbacterial interactions and applied these to the characterization of type VI secretion (T6S) in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.