Development of sustainable nutrient management strategies for taro growers on Taveuni Island, Fiji : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Soil Science, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is a major component of the socio-cultural, dietary and economic livelihood of Pacific Island countries, including Fiji. However, Fiji’s total taro exports have substantially declined over the last decade, mainly due to a reduction in production from Taveuni Island. A trend of decreasing taro yields has been further exasperated by recent extreme climate events, which have reduced the availability and affordability of planting material. The combination of lower yields and increased costs, have reduced farmers’ returns on existing farm land, which has contributed to further deforestation of forest reserves. The overall aim of this study was to develop improved nutrient management practices on existing farm land, to help growers to achieve sustainable taro yields and financial returns. This study included a survey of 73 taro farmers, which involved a quantitative analysis of taro yields and soil fertility. Fresh taro corm yields were very low, being an average of 6.9 t/ha. About 75% of the farms surveyed had low soil Olsen phosphorus (P) levels of < 10 mg/kg and 65% had low soil exchangeable potassium (K) levels of < 0.4 me/100g. Fertiliser nutrient inputs were also low, with semi-commercial farmers using an average of 31 kg nitrogen (N), 17 kg P and 27 kg K/ha, and commercial growers using an average of 41 kg N, 26 kg P and 40 kg K/ha per crop. The survey also identified that fertiliser placement and application timing practices may also reduce nutrient use efficiency by the crop. Two successive field experiments were repeated over three sites, on Taveuni Island, to evaluate a range of nutrient management strategies to improve soil fertility and taro productivity. When no N and P fertiliser was applied, average fresh taro corm yields were very low (6.2 t/ha), irrespective of K and sulphur (S) fertiliser inputs. The addition of up to 200 kg N/ha and 120 kg P/ha, resulted in a substantial average yield increase to 14.9 t/ha. Taro yields were also responsive to K fertiliser use, with significant increases in yield up to 200 kg K/ha, the highest rate of K assessed. There was a strong linear relationship between N fertiliser use and taro sucker population up to 300 kg N/ha. In the second experiment, sucker numbers increased with increasing N fertiliser rate up to 280 kg N/ha. Further increasing N rates up to 360 kg N/ha did no further increase sucker production. When no fertiliser was applied, average taro sucker population across the three sites was about 20,500 suckers/ha, which increased to about 122,500/ha at 280 kg N/ha. The response of sucker numbers to N was not influenced by P fertiliser use, but there was a small effect with increasing K fertiliser rate, from 100 to 200 kg K/ha. Following natural disasters, when sucker numbers are limited, the use of N fertiliser may be an effective short-term strategy to help re-establish the taro industry and minimise inflated sucker prices. The use of the legume mucuna, as a green manure crop intercropped with taro, reduced N fertiliser requirements. Mucuna provided a benefit, for both corm yield and sucker numbers, equivalent to N fertiliser applied at a rate of approximately 80-100 kg N/ha. Some of the benefit may also be due to improved weed suppression and a mulching effect from mucuna. Mixing P fertiliser in the planting hole increased corm yields by 38%, compared to the when P fertiliser was placed at the bottom of the hole. Despite the high rates of P fertiliser used in the first experiment there were no significant P carry-over effects on taro yields in the second experiment. This was due to the higher soil P status from P fertiliser application being confined in close proximity to the planting holes. The Soil Plant Analysis Development (SPAD) chlorophyll meter was evaluated as being effective at predicting N status of taro crops and yield potential, when other major nutrients were non-limiting. When SPAD readings were greater than 65, at 8 and 12 weeks after planting (WAP), then the taro yields were mostly high (i.e. > 12 t/ha). SPAD readings less than 40, at 8 and 12 WAP, would indicate that plant N status is likely to limit taro yield and that a review of N fertiliser use is required. The recommended nutrient management strategy for taro farmers with farms with degraded soil fertility, involves the use of inter-cropping taro with a mucuna green manure crop in combination with fertiliser at the following nutrient rates; 120 kg N, 120 kg, 200 kg K/ha and 80 kg S/ha. At current taro corm and sucker prices, this recommended strategy is expected to provide a net income of NZ$35,835, which is 247% higher than for the average grower practice. The recommended practice also produces 74% more taro suckers than the current grower practice. Increasing sucker production is an important strategy to enable taro growers to increase production quickly following a natural disaster, helping farmers be more resilient to the effects of Climate Change

CoNMix for Source-free Single and Multi-target Domain Adaptation

This work introduces the novel task of Source-free Multi-target Domain Adaptation and proposes adaptation framework comprising of \textbf{Co}nsistency with \textbf{N}uclear-Norm Maximization and \textbf{Mix}Up knowledge distillation (\textit{CoNMix}) as a solution to this problem. The main motive of this work is to solve for Single and Multi target Domain Adaptation (SMTDA) for the source-free paradigm, which enforces a constraint where the labeled source data is not available during target adaptation due to various privacy-related restrictions on data sharing. The source-free approach leverages target pseudo labels, which can be noisy, to improve the target adaptation. We introduce consistency between label preserving augmentations and utilize pseudo label refinement methods to reduce noisy pseudo labels. Further, we propose novel MixUp Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for better generalization on multiple target domains using various source-free STDA models. We also show that the Vision Transformer (VT) backbone gives better feature representation with improved domain transferability and class discriminability. Our proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in various paradigms of source-free STDA and MTDA settings on popular domain adaptation datasets like Office-Home, Office-Caltech, and DomainNet. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/conmix-vclComment: Accepted at WACV 202

Evaluation of Mulberry Leaf Meal Feeding on the Growth and Hematological Profile of Cross Bred Heifers

Mulberry (Morus alba) is a multipurpose fodder tree with a high voluntary intake. Mulberry foliage is characterized by high digestibility and excellent level of protein which makes it comparable to commercial concentrates for dairy cattle. o evaluate the effect of dietary inclusion of mulberry leaf meal as a concentrate replacement (20%) in the crossbred heifers ration the present investigation was carried out at dairy farm Dr YSPUHF Nauni Solan. In the study, a total of 12 cross bred heifers (1-2 yr) were divided into two equal groups of 6 animals each, on the basis of body weight. The animals of the treatment group were supplemented with mulberry leaf meal to replace concentrate mixture at the level of 20% for a period of 4 months. All the animals under experiment were weighed and blood samples were collected at fortnightly intervals to assess the live weight gain and hematological profile. The mulberry leaf meal contained 15.44 % CP, 14.32 % ash, 15.27 % CF, 43.57% NDF and 31.66 % ADF. The mean body weight (159.65kg), weight gain (40.65kg), average daily gain (338.75gm/day) blood glucose (41.07 mg/dl) and blood total protein (83.27 g/litre) was higher in the treatment group as compared to the body weight (157.08 kg), weight gain (37.36kg), average daily gain (311.33gm/day), blood glucose (40.09 mg/dl) and blood total protein (82.03 g/litre) of the control group. Mean Hb concentration was higher in crossbred heifers of the treatment group (9.19 g/dl) as compared to the control group (9.17g/dl). While blood creatinine (µmol/lt) and blood urea level (mmol/litre) were higher in the control group (116.08 and 5.67) as compared to the treatment group (112.34 and 5.09). The study concluded that the replacement of concentrate mixture @ 20% by mulberry leaf meal in animal feeding resulted in better growth performance at a lower cost and did not have any adverse effect haematological profile of the crossbred heifers

Effect of planting geometry and training on growth and seed yield of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.)

The study was conducted to evaluate the effect of planting geometry and training on growth and seed yield of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) using cultivar Solan Lalima during Kharif 2013 at Experimental Farm of Department of Seed Science and Technology, Dr. Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni, Solan (H.P.). The treatments comprised of four training levels i.e. Y1 (single stem), Y2 (double stem), Y3 (unpruned with horizontal string) and Y4 (unpruned bush stakes (control)) and eight plant densities viz. S1 (60×15 cm), S2 (60+30×15 cm), S3 (60×30 cm), S4 (60+30×30 cm), S5 (90×15 cm), S6 (90+30×15 cm), S7 (90×30 cm) and S8 (90+30×30 cm). Analysis of variance showed that the treatment combination Y1S7 (single stem and plant spaced at 90×30 cm) resulted in maximum ripe fruit length and width (5.86 cm and 5.06 cm, respectively), maximum number of seeds/fruit (110.67), minimum days to ripe fruit harvest (71.00) and maximum harvest duration (59.84 days) but gave the low seed yield. The combination Y2S5 (double stem and 90×15 cm) resulted highest seed yield i.e. 519.71 kg per hectare. Therefore, planting density S5 (90x15 cm) in combination with training system Y2 (double stem) may be recommended for commercial seed production of tomato

Correlation of mitotic activity and Ki 67 with BR score and molecular classification in carcinoma breast

Background: To determine if mitotic activity played a role in classifying breast cancer in terms of its biological behaviour. We investigated the prospect of identifying a more meaningful cell proliferation marker for categorising treatment-naive breast cancer. Methods: The 150 cases diagnosed as invasive breast carcinoma in the histopathology section were systematically studied for the clinical, gross, and microscopic features. Results: the 50% patients were grade 2 (75), 41% were grade 3 (71) and 9% (14) were grade 1 in present study. The distribution of intrinsic subtypes was luminal A 25% (38), luminal B 59% (88), HER2 enriched 10% (15), basal 6% (9). Out of 150 cases, 29% (43) cases were T1, T2 were 65% (97), T3 were 2% (4), T4 were 4% (6). Mean Ki 67 was 15.6±8.8 in grade 1, 23.3±15.4 and 38.2± in grade 3. There was significant difference between I and III, and II and III (p&lt;0.05). Mean mitotic count in grade 1 was 5.4±2.7, in grade 2 it was 9.7±13.5, in grade 3 it was 16.1±6.9. There was significant difference between grade 1 and 2, grade 2 and 3, grade 1 and 3 (p&lt;0.05). There was significant difference between T stages (p&lt;0.05). Conclusions: Ki 67 showed a more significant statistical correlation with prognostic factors as compared to mitotic count; we feel Ki 67 is more superior to mitotic count as a prognostic factor.

Notes on the distribution of an alien weed Hyptis brevipes (Lamiaceae) in India

Hyptis brevipes Poit. is a native weed species of South and Central America and has been introduced and naturalized in many parts of SE Asia. It was reported from India for the first time in 1940 from Andaman and Nicobar Islands and then in 2012 from Darjeeling Himalaya. In the present study the authors have noticed the occurrence of the species in the wild in the Dima Hasao district of Assam and the Dampa Tiger Reserve of Mizoram. The study reveals that the species has naturalized in India in some parts of the Northeast region in cultivated lands along roadsides. The detailed taxonomic account of the species along with its distribution, phenology, uses and photographs is provided to confirm its identity and to take stock on its control from its further spread to some other regions, because due to the invasive nature it may affect the growth of crop plants

Causes of blindness and vision impairment in 2020 and trends over 30 years, and prevalence of avoidable blindness in relation to VISION 2020: the Right to Sight: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study

Background: Many causes of vision impairment can be prevented or treated. With an ageing global population, the demands for eye health services are increasing. We estimated the prevalence and relative contribution of avoidable causes of blindness and vision impairment globally from 1990 to 2020. We aimed to compare the results with the World Health Assembly Global Action Plan (WHA GAP) target of a 25% global reduction from 2010 to 2019 in avoidable vision impairment, defined as cataract and undercorrected refractive error. Methods: We did a systematic review and meta-analysis of population-based surveys of eye disease from January, 1980, to October, 2018. We fitted hierarchical models to estimate prevalence (with 95% uncertainty intervals [UIs]) of moderate and severe vision impairment (MSVI; presenting visual acuity from <6/18 to 3/60) and blindness (<3/60 or less than 10° visual field around central fixation) by cause, age, region, and year. Because of data sparsity at younger ages, our analysis focused on adults aged 50 years and older. Findings: Global crude prevalence of avoidable vision impairment and blindness in adults aged 50 years and older did not change between 2010 and 2019 (percentage change −0·2% [95% UI −1·5 to 1·0]; 2019 prevalence 9·58 cases per 1000 people [95% IU 8·51 to 10·8], 2010 prevalence 96·0 cases per 1000 people [86·0 to 107·0]). Age-standardised prevalence of avoidable blindness decreased by −15·4% [–16·8 to −14·3], while avoidable MSVI showed no change (0·5% [–0·8 to 1·6]). However, the number of cases increased for both avoidable blindness (10·8% [8·9 to 12·4]) and MSVI (31·5% [30·0 to 33·1]). The leading global causes of blindness in those aged 50 years and older in 2020 were cataract (15·2 million cases [9% IU 12·7–18·0]), followed by glaucoma (3·6 million cases [2·8–4·4]), undercorrected refractive error (2·3 million cases [1·8–2·8]), age-related macular degeneration (1·8 million cases [1·3–2·4]), and diabetic retinopathy (0·86 million cases [0·59–1·23]). Leading causes of MSVI were undercorrected refractive error (86·1 million cases [74·2–101·0]) and cataract (78·8 million cases [67·2–91·4]). Interpretation: Results suggest eye care services contributed to the observed reduction of age-standardised rates of avoidable blindness but not of MSVI, and that the target in an ageing global population was not reached. Funding: Brien Holden Vision Institute, Fondation Théa, The Fred Hollows Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lions Clubs International Foundation, Sightsavers International, and University of Heidelberg