Bitter pit : a progress report on the use of calcium nitrate sprays for its control

FREEDOM from serious pests and diseases such as Black Spot and Codling Moth and relative immunity from storage rots has greatly simplified apple growing in Western Australia. However, what has been gained in this respect is often countered by pre-harvest and post-harvest physiological troubles which are rather common to apple growing in this State

The control of bitter pit in apples

Bitter pit is a physiological disorder of apples which causes considerable wastage of otherwise sound fruit . It is a problem of world-wide occurrence and in Western Australia growing conditions appear particularly favourable for its development. In recent years a practical means of control by calcium sprays has been developed

A Geovisual Analytic Approach to Understanding Geo-Social Relationships in the International Trade Network

The world has become a complex set of geo-social systems interconnected by networks, including transportation networks, telecommunications, and the internet. Understanding the interactions between spatial and social relationships within such geo-social systems is a challenge. This research aims to address this challenge through the framework of geovisual analytics. We present the GeoSocialApp which implements traditional network analysis methods in the context of explicitly spatial and social representations. We then apply it to an exploration of international trade networks in terms of the complex interactions between spatial and social relationships. This exploration using the GeoSocialApp helps us develop a two-part hypothesis: international trade network clusters with structural equivalence are strongly ‘balkanized’ (fragmented) according to the geography of trading partners, and the geographical distance weighted by population within each network cluster has a positive relationship with the development level of countries. In addition to demonstrating the potential of visual analytics to provide insight concerning complex geo-social relationships at a global scale, the research also addresses the challenge of validating insights derived through interactive geovisual analytics. We develop two indicators to quantify the observed patterns, and then use a Monte-Carlo approach to support the hypothesis developed above

Large eddy simulation of interacting barchan dunes in a steady, unidirectional flow

We have performed large-eddy simulations of turbulent flow 4 over barchan dunes in a channel with different interdune spacings in the downstream direction at Reynolds number, Re∞ ≃ 26000 (based on the free 6 stream velocity and channel height). Simulations are validated against ex-perimental data (at Re∞ = 55460); the largest interdune spacing (2.38λ, where λ is the length of the barchan model) presents similar characteristics to the isolated dune in the experiment, indicating that at this distance the sheltering effect of the upstream dune is rather weak. We examine 3D realizations of the mean and instantaneous flow to explain features of the flow field relevant to sediment transport. Barchan dunes induce two counter-rotating streamwise vortices, along each of the horns, which direct high-momentum fluid toward the symmetry plane and low-momentum fluid near the bed away from the centerline. The flow near the bed, upstream of the dune, diverges from the centerline plane, decelerates and then rises on the stoss side of the dune while accelerating; the flow close to the centerline plane separates at the crest and reattaches on the bed. Away from the centerline plane and along the horns, flow separation occurs intermittently. The flow in the separation bubble is routed towards the horns and leaves the dune at their tips. The separated flow at the crest reattaches on the bed, except on the centerline symmetry plane of the dune, where a weak saddle point of separation ap- pears at the bed. The distribution of the bed shear-stress, characteristics of the separation and reattachment regions, and instantaneous wall turbulence are discussed. Characteristics of the internal boundary layer developing on the bed after the reattachment region are studied. The interdune spacing isfound to affect significantly the turbulent flow over the stoss side of the downstream dunes; at smaller interdune-spacings, coherent high- and low- speed streaks are shorter but stronger, and the spanwise normal Reynolds stress is larger. The turbulent kinetic energy budgets show the importance of the pressure transport and mean-flow advection in transporting energy from the overlying wake layer to the internal boundary layer over the stoss side of the closely-spaced dunes. The characteristics of the separated-shear layer are altered slightly at smaller interdune spacing; the separation bubble is smaller, the separated-shear layer is stronger, and the bed shear-stress is larger. Away from the dunes, typical wall-turbulence structures are observed, but coher- ent eddies generated in the separated-shear layer due to the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability are dominant near the dune. Coherent structures are generated more frequently at smaller interdune spacing; they move farther away from the bed, towards the free surface, and remain in between the horns. At larger interdune spacings, these coherent structures are advected in the spanwise direction with the mean streamwise vortices and can be observed outside of the dunes

Horizon 2020: a call to forge biodiversity links

For the upcoming calls for Horizon 2020 research funding, the European Commission has said that it would prefer bids from open, collaborative consortia rather than the competitive bids seen in previous funding programmes. To this end, the organizers of 18 European biodiversity informatics projects agreed at a meeting in Rome

Conditioned and Manipulable Matrix For Visual Exploration

this paper. Based on a traditional matrix view of data, such as a scatterplot matrix, this paper enhances the matrix in two aspects. One is to support the direct manipulation of data representation in row/column position (Siirtola, 1999) and ease the selection of data to visualize using variable fields and observed data ranges. Users can easily select the variables or a range of observations they want to focus on and change the row/column position in the matrix dynamically via a graphical interface. The second enhancement to a "traditional" scatterplot matrix is to add the capability to condition the data depicted in the matrix on a related variable (conditioning is described below). Our goal is to offer an intuitive interface, through which users can visualize and manipulate any subsets within large geospatial datasets using familiar statistical tools and thus help analysts in partner U.S. government agencies to identify outliers, errors, spatial clusters and patterns, and possible multivariate correlations from both the users and datasets perspectives. Furthermore, using a component-based design for the matrix allows it to be coordinated with other software components, in order to enable more comprehensive and flexible information visualization (e.g., linked brushing) and database querie

Bitter pit : a progress report on the use of calcium nitrate sprays for its control

FREEDOM from serious pests and diseases such as Black Spot and Codling Moth and relative immunity from storage rots has greatly simplified apple growing in Western Australia. However, what has been gained in this respect is often countered by pre-harvest and post-harvest physiological troubles which are rather common to apple growing in this State