Associating wheat crop and undersown forage legumes in organic agriculture: Incidence of forage legumes species

One of the key issues of organic arable systems is to increase use of N2 fixation from legume plants while enhancing autonomy by the limitation of off-farm inputs. Wheat yield in organic agriculture is generally low and variable. Grain yield and protein content are strongly affected by N deficiency and weed competition (Casagrande et al., 2009). Previous research had clearly demonstrated the benefits of forage legumes to improve N balance and preserve weed infestation (den Hollander et al., 2007). Several authors highlighted the interest of crop mixtures combining cereal and legumes to provide higher overall productivity, enhance ecological services and improve economical profitability (Malezieux et al., 2008). Nevertheless, previous research also highlights how important it is to manage whether above- and belowground interactions between species to optimise benefits and limit competition. We propose here to analyse how the insertion of legumes species influences the performance of organic wheat (yield, grain protein content) but also the weeds population during and after crop cycle

Incidence of soil N fertility on the performance of organic forage legume-wheat mixtures.

One of the key issues of organic arable systems is to bring enough nitrogen in the crop rotation to ensure satisfying crop nutrition. Wheat yield in organic agriculture are generally low and variable. Grain yield and grain protein content are strongly affected by N deficiency and weed competition (Casagrande et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the autonomy of the organic cropping systems has to be improved while off-farm inputs have to be limited. The use of N2 fixation from legume plants should then be improved. Previous research had clearly demonstrated the benefits of forage legumes in association to improve N balance and control weed seed bank. However, it is also well known that legume N2 fixation could be limited depending on the soil N fertility. The functioning of such mixtures could then be disturbed by variations of the nitrogen fertility of the environment. The impact of soil N fertility has to be studied in order to manage whether above- and belowground interactions between species and to optimise benefits of the association

The Determinants of Private Sector Performance in Mozambique: A Case Study of Small and Medium Scale Tourism Firms

Mozambique has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, since the mid 1990s. One of the major contributors for this growth is the tourism sector, thanks to its natural comparative advantage:  a long cost with yet unexploited natural assets. In fact since the end of the civil war, the sector has improved markedly in line with the general trend of the rest of the economy. From 1995 to  2007 the total investment in the sector amounted to 1.8 billion US$, almost 14$ 200 million was invested and the physical hotel capacity is reported to have grown by more than 50% in the last 8 years

Management Skills, Human and Social Capital and SMEs in the Tourism Sector in Mozambique

Tourism plays an integral role in the economy of Mozambique. Due to the country's excellent tourist attractions, the industry holds huge growth potential and has even been tipped to be one of Africa's top destinations but only if the industry is well managed and made all inclusive

Introduction toSocialRadio Case Studies and Perspectives

National audienceIn this paper, we introduce a Social Radio platform designed to support contextual communication between communities. Radio communication was no longer used for information broadcast using different communication channels. The same concept is used in this work but for different purposes. We set up a microblogging community channel to report, comment or simply vote some events. In order to understand the concept we detail a scenario in the epidemic field

WOLF: a Research Platform to Write NFC Secure Applications on Top of Multiple Secure Elements (With an Original SQL-Like Interface)

International audienceThis article presents the WOLF (Wallet Open Library Framework) platform which supports an original interface for NFC developers called " SE-QL ". SE-QL is a SQL-like interface which eases and optimizes NFC secure application development in making the heterogeneity of the Secure Element (SE) transparent. SE implementation could be " embedded " (eSE) in the mobile device, or inside the SIM Card (UICC), or " on-host " software-based, or in the Cloud (e.g. through HCE); every SE implementation has its own interface(s) making NFC secure-application development extremely cumbersome and complex. Proposed SE-QL solves this problem. This article demonstrates the feasibility and attractiveness of our approach based upon an original high-level API

Wheat/forage legume intercropping in organic grain system: an answer to both weed and nitrogen deficiency issues

Organic grain system managers have to find solutions to nitrogen deficiency and weed infestation. It is especially true when no animals are present on the farm to justify the use of forage legumes despite their interests in the crop succession. Our study focused on the role of four legume cover crop species inserted in a succession of winter wheat and maize on both problems. This insertion consisted in relay-intercropping the legumes under the canopy of wheat. Cover crops were maintained on the field after the harvest of the cereal until the sowing of the subsequent maize crop. The performance of the three crops of the succession was monitored as well as weed development and nitrogen dynamic in the soil-plant system. On the one hand, our results showed that black medic and red clover, that supported the best the competition of wheat, were likely to decrease its grain protein content at harvest (-0.3 to -0.4 %). On the other hand, the four species did not decrease intercropped wheat grain yield. They were able to control weed infestation during the intercropping period and between the two cash crops. Finally, nitrogen restitution to the subsequent maize crop was efficient and allowed a significant 30 % increase of maize grain yield

Aporrectodea caliginosa, a relevant earthworm species for a posteriori pesticide risk assessment: current knowledge and recommendations for culture and experimental design

Ecotoxicological tests with earthworms are widely used and are mandatory for the risk assessment of pesticides prior to registration and commercial use. The current model species for standardized tests is Eisenia fetida or Eisenia andrei. However, these species are absent from agricultural soils and often less sensitive to pesticides than other earthworm species found in mineral soils. To move towards a better assessment of pesticide effects on non-target organisms, there is a need to performaposterioritestsusingrelevantspecies.TheendogeicspeciesAporrectodeacaliginosa(Savigny,1826)isrepresentative of cultivated fields in temperate regions and is suggested as a relevant model test species. After providing information on its taxonomy, biology, and ecology, we reviewed current knowledge concerning its sensitivity towards pesticides. Moreover, we highlighted research gaps and promising perspectives. Finally, advice and recommendations are given for the establishment of laboratory cultures and experiments using this soil-dwelling earthworm species

You'll Never Tweet Alone Building Sports Match Timelines from Microblog Posts

International audienceIn this paper, we propose an approach to build a timeline with actions in a sports game based on tweets. We combine information provided by external knowledge bases to enrich the content of the tweets, and apply graph theory to model relations between actions and participants in a game. We demonstrate the validity of our approach using tweets collected during the EURO 2016 Championship and evaluate the output against live summaries produced by sports channels