Bacteria-inducing legume nodules involved in the improvement of plant growth, health and nutrition

Bacteria-inducing legume nodules are known as rhizobia and belong to the class Alphaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria. They promote the growth and nutrition of their respective legume hosts through atmospheric nitrogen fixation which takes place in the nodules induced in their roots or stems. In addition, rhizobia have other plant growth-promoting mechanisms, mainly solubilization of phosphate and production of indoleacetic acid, ACC deaminase and siderophores. Some of these mechanisms have been reported for strains of rhizobia which are also able to promote the growth of several nonlegumes, such as cereals, oilseeds and vegetables. Less studied are the mechanisms that have the rhizobia to promote the plant health; however, these bacteria are able to exert biocontrol of some phytopathogens and to induce the plant resistance. In this chapter, we revised the available data about the ability of the legume nodule-inducing bacteria for improving the plant growth, health and nutrition of both legumes and nonlegumes. These data showed that rhizobia meet all the requirements of sustainable agriculture to be used as bio-inoculants allowing the total or partial replacement of chemicals used for fertilization or protection of crops

A CLASS-OUTLIER APPROACH FOR ENVIRONNEMENTAL MONITORING USING UAV HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGES

In several remote sensing applications, detecting exceptional/irregular regions (i.e, pixels) with respect to the whole dataset homogeneity is regarded as a very interested issue. Currently, this is limited to the pre-processing step aiming to eliminate the cloud or noisy pixels. In this paper, we propose to extend the coverage area and to tackle this issue by regarding the irregular/exceptional pixels as outliers. The main purpose is the adaptation of the class outlier mining concept in order to find abnormal and irregular pixels in hyperspectral images. This should be done taking into account the class labels and the relative uncertainty of collected data. To reach this goal, the Class Outliers: DistanceBased (CODB) algorithm is enhanced to take into account the multivariate high-dimensional data and the concomitant partially available knowledge of our data. This is mainly done by using belief theory and a learnable task-specific similarity measure. To validate our approach, we apply it for vegetation inspection and normality monitoring. For experimental purposes, the Airborne Prism Experiment (APEX) data, set acquired during an APEX flight campaign in June 2011, was used. Moreover, a collection of simulated hyperspectral images and spectral indices, providing a quantitative indicator of vegetation health, were generated for this purpose. The encouraging obtained results can be used to monitor areas where vegetation may be stressed, as a proxy to detect potential drought