The spore characteristics of ferns play an important role in taxonomy; however, comprehensive spore data for most species of the genus <i>Platycerium</i> remain scarce. In this study, spores of <i>Platycerium</i> were examined using light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. We established the first comprehensive dataset on spore morphology in <i>Platycerium</i>. Based on morphological characteristics, we classified the spores into four distinct types, each described in detail. Spore surface ornamentation proved to be an effective diagnostic feature for <i>Platycerium coronarium</i>, <i>P. madagascariense</i>, <i>P</i>. <i>ridleyi</i>, and <i>P</i>. <i>stemaria</i>. The systematic significance of spore morphology in <i>Platycerium</i> was discussed, while no significant linear correlation was found across <i>Platycerium</i> between spore sizes and genome sizes. Our findings are important for understanding the relationship between spores and ploidy levels in Polypodiaceae and their evolutionary implications.
Foundation segmentation models achieve reasonable leaf instance extraction from top-view crop images without training (i.e., zero-shot). However, segmenting entire plant individuals with each consisting of multiple overlapping leaves remains challenging. This problem is referred to as a hierarchical segmentation task, typically requiring annotated training datasets, which are often species-specific and require notable human labor. To address this, we introduce ZeroPlantSeg, a zero-shot segmentation for rosette-shaped plant individuals from top-view images. We integrate a foundation segmentation model, extracting leaf instances, and a vision-language model, reasoning about plants' structures to extract plant individuals without additional training. Evaluations on datasets with multiple plant species, growth stages, and shooting environments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing zero-shot methods and achieves better cross-domain performance than supervised methods. Implementations are available at https://github.com/JunhaoXing/ZeroPlantSeg.
Moshiur Rahman Tonmoy, Md. Mithun Hossain, Nilanjan Dey
et al.
Plant diseases significantly threaten global food security by reducing crop yields and undermining agricultural sustainability. AI-driven automated classification has emerged as a promising solution, with deep learning models demonstrating impressive performance in plant disease identification. However, deploying these models on mobile and edge devices remains challenging due to high computational demands and resource constraints, highlighting the need for lightweight, accurate solutions for accessible smart agriculture systems. To address this, we propose MobilePlantViT, a novel hybrid Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture designed for generalized plant disease classification, which optimizes resource efficiency while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across diverse plant disease datasets of varying scales show our model's effectiveness and strong generalizability, achieving test accuracies ranging from 80% to over 99%. Notably, with only 0.69 million parameters, our architecture outperforms the smallest versions of MobileViTv1 and MobileViTv2, despite their higher parameter counts. These results underscore the potential of our approach for real-world, AI-powered automated plant disease classification in sustainable and resource-efficient smart agriculture systems. All codes will be available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/moshiurtonmoy/MobilePlantViT
Joe Hrzich, Michael A. Beck, Christopher P. Bidinosti
et al.
We present an open-source, low-cost photogrammetry system for 3D plant modeling and phenotyping. The system uses a structure-from-motion approach to reconstruct 3D representations of the plants via point clouds. Using wheat as an example, we demonstrate how various phenotypic traits can be computed easily from the point clouds. These include standard measurements such as plant height and radius, as well as features that would be more cumbersome to measure by hand, such as leaf angles and convex hull. We further demonstrate the utility of the system through the investigation of specific metrics that may yield objective classifications of erectophile versus planophile wheat canopy architectures.
We formulate a statistical-mechanical description of a recently introduced random planting model in which plants are represented by growing hard disks. Seedlings of negligible size are introduced at random positions in a field, grow at a prescribed rate, and are harvested upon reaching a fixed maturity diameter. Planting attempts that would lead to an overlap at any time during growth are rejected. Starting from an empty field, this simple dynamical rule drives the system to a nonequilibrium steady state in which the mean planting and harvesting rates coincide. We show that the steady state can be mapped onto a nonadditive polydisperse hard-disk fluid and exploit this mapping to develop analytical predictions based on a low-density virial expansion and on scaled particle theory. The resulting description yields an effective adsorption isotherm for the steady-state plant density as a function of the planting rate and compares favorably with numerical simulations over a wide range of parameters. At large planting rates, the density approaches the optimal value achieved by desynchronized regular planting, and the data are consistent with an algebraic approach to this limit with an exponent close to 1/3. Beyond density and yield, we show that the spatial organization of the field at high planting rates exhibits clear signatures of the same underlying geometric constraints that characterize optimal desynchronized planting. This connection is revealed through both the conventional radial distribution function and a radius-resolved pair correlation g(z,r) which highlights strong size correlations associated with parent-child seeding events and whose structure can be interpreted as a dynamically broadened precursor of the corresponding ideal mixe--size lattice. Finally, we extend the theory to sigmoidal growth laws and compute the associated virial coefficient.
Nitesh Subedi, Hsin-Jung Yang, Devesh K. Jha
et al.
Autonomous harvesting in the open presents a complex manipulation problem. In most scenarios, an autonomous system has to deal with significant occlusion and require interaction in the presence of large structural uncertainties (every plant is different). Perceptual and modeling uncertainty make design of reliable manipulation controllers for harvesting challenging, resulting in poor performance during deployment. We present a sim2real reinforcement learning (RL) framework for occlusion-aware plant manipulation, where a policy is learned entirely in simulation to reposition stems and leaves to reveal target fruit(s). In our proposed approach, we decouple high-level kinematic planning from low-level compliant control which simplifies the sim2real transfer. This decomposition allows the learned policy to generalize across multiple plants with different stiffness and morphology. In experiments with multiple real-world plant setups, our system achieves up to 86.7% success in exposing target fruits, demonstrating robustness to occlusion variation and structural uncertainty.
Crabapple is an important ornamental tree species. This study analyzed 13 crabapple cultivars, examining pigment composition and content across different stages of development. According to the phenotypic and CIE Lab color system, different crabapple cultivars were clustered and analyzed, and the flower, leaf, and fruit colors of crabapple were divided into different lines. High performance liquid chromatography coupled with a diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) analysis showed that cyanidin-3-O-galactoside was the main anthocyanin in crabapple, with higher levels in the deep-red-line variety. Additionally, the petals of the purplish-red-line crabapple were found to contain higher levels of anthocyanins and carotenoids. The red-line leaves of crabapple exhibit high anthocyanin content, which gradually decreases as the leaves turn green. The ratio of carotenoids to chlorophyll was relatively high in yellow leaves. In fruits, the red-line crabapple exhibits the highest percentage of anthocyanins, which are the primary pigment substances. As the fruit changed from red to green, chlorophyll and carotenoids gradually accumulated, while anthocyanin content decreased. In yellow-line fruits, the percentage of carotenoids was relatively high. The results indicated that the color change in crabapple was driven by shifts in the relative proportions of these three pigments. Particularly, the ratio of flavonols was relatively high in the white-line crabapple petals. The ratio of flavanols to flavanones was higher in yellow leaves and fruits. This suggests that flavonols and flavanols act as co-pigments of anthocyanins, enhancing color presentation. Furthermore, crabapple is rich in phenolic compounds, including phloridzin, chlorogenic acid, hyperoside, taxifolin, and epicatechin.
Plant ecology, Environmental effects of industries and plants
Phages use bacterial host resources to replicate, intrinsically linking phage and host survival. To understand phage dynamics, it is essential to understand phage-host ecology. A key step in this ecology is infection of bacterial hosts. Previous work has explored single and multiple, sequential infections. Here we focus on the theory of simultaneous infections, where multiple phages simultaneously attach to and infect one bacterial host cell. Simultaneous infections are a relevant infection dynamic to consider, especially at high phage densities when many phages attach to a single host cell in a short time window. For high bacterial growth rates, simultaneous infection can result in bi-stability: depending on initial conditions phages go extinct or co-exist with hosts, either at stable densities or through periodic oscillations of a stable limit cycle. This bears important consequences for phage applications such as phage therapy: phages can persist even though they cannot invade. Consequently, through spikes in phage densities it is possible to infect a bacterial population even when the phage basic reproductive number is less than one. In the regime of stable limit cycles, if timed right, only small densities of phage may be necessary.
Ion Ciobotari, Adriana Príncipe, Maria Alexandra Oliveira
et al.
The collection of ecological data in the field is essential to diagnose, monitor and manage ecosystems in a sustainable way. Since acquisition of this information through traditional methods are generally time-consuming, due to the capability of recording large volumes of data in short time periods, automation of data acquisition sees a growing trend. Terrestrial laser scanners (TLS), particularly LiDAR sensors, have been used in ecology, allowing to reconstruct the 3D structure of vegetation, and thus, infer ecosystem characteristics based on the spatial variation of the density of points. However, the low amount of information obtained per beam, lack of data analysis tools and the high cost of the equipment limit their use. This way, a low-cost TLS (<10k$) was developed along with data acquisition and processing mechanisms applicable in two case studies: an urban garden and a target area for ecological restoration. The orientation of LiDAR was modified to make observations in the vertical plane and a motor was integrated for its rotation, enabling the acquisition of 360 degree data with high resolution. Motion and location sensors were also integrated for automatic error correction and georeferencing. From the data generated, histograms of point density variation along the vegetation height were created, where shrub stratum was easily distinguishable from tree stratum, and maximum tree height and shrub cover were calculated. These results agreed with the field data, whereby the developed TLS has proved to be effective in calculating metrics of structural complexity of vegetation.
The growth of plants is a hydromechanical phenomenon in which cells enlarge by absorbing water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-induced tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically interconnected, morphogenesis results from the combined effect of local cell growths, which reflects the action of heterogeneous mechanical, physical, and chemical fields, each exerting varying degrees of nonlocal influence within the tissue. To describe this process, we propose a physical field theory of plant growth. This theory treats the tissue as a poromorphoelastic body, namely a growing poroelastic medium, where growth arises from pressure-induced deformations and osmotically-driven imbibition of the tissue. From this perspective, growing regions correspond to hydraulic sinks, leading to the possibility of complex non-local regulations, such as water competition and growth-induced water potential gradients. More in general, this work aims to establish foundations for a mechanistic, mechanical field theory of morphogenesis in plants, where growth arises from the interplay of multiple physical fields, and where biochemical regulations are integrated through specific physical parameters.
Antonio José Barotto, Juan Marcelo Gauna, María Laura Tonello
et al.
En un contexto de cambio climático y mayor demanda de energía, la biomasa, en particular la leña y el carbón vegetal, constituye una alternativa valiosa para el reemplazo de combustibles fósiles, con un mejor balance de emisiones gaseosas y un gran potencial en nuestro país. En particular, el género Eucalyptus puede ser muy relevante en este proceso, ya que constituye el segundo género forestal a nivel nacional, siendo el noreste de Entre Ríos uno de sus mayores núcleos productivos. Una correcta caracterización de los materiales disponibles en nuestro país contribuirá a su valorización para diversos fines, entre los que se destaca el dendroenergético. El objetivo del presente trabajo fue caracterizar y comparar diversas propiedades dendroenergéticas de la madera del fuste y el carbón de diferentes materiales del género Eucalyptus, incluyendo especies, híbridos y clones de siete años de edad. Con respecto a la madera, los materiales testeados se ubicaron dentro del rango de maderas livianas y semipesadas, cuyas características analizadas (contenido de cenizas, poder calorífico, rendimiento de carbonización) presentaron órdenes de magnitud similares a los reportados por trabajos referentes a este género botánico. En cuanto al carbón, se encontraron resultados contrastantes en función de la variable considerada (densidad aparente relativa, cenizas, volátiles, carbono fijo y poder calorífico). En función de ello, se remarca la necesidad de continuar con los análisis, empleando diferentes protocolos, a fin de corroborar los valores obtenidos para estas características, las cuales resultan de gran importancia para establecer el potencial dendroenergético para su uso doméstico e industrial.
Sofia Spormann, Cristiano Soares, Manuel Azenha
et al.
Conventional tomato production is widely threatened by environmental changes that impose increasingly frequent and severe conditions of soil salinization and water shortage. The assessment of the wild germplasm has become an appealing strategy for the stress-resilience improvement of crops. Tomato interspecific diversity encompasses wild species that are native to the dry shores and high-elevated deserts of the Andean countries, often thriving under circumstances of drought and salinity. The present work aimed to compare the effects of moderate salinity stress under different watering regimes on the ion distribution, redox homeostasis, osmoregulation, and antioxidant defenses between a domestic cultivar of tomato (Chico III) and the wild tomato species Solanum galapagense (LA1403), Solanum habrochaites (LA1223), and Solanum neorickii (LA2194). Results showed that although wild tomato plants grew slower than the cultivar, their growth was less affected by exposure to salt or to lower water availability. S. galapagense revealed a Na+ includer behavior under salt stress, increasing Na+ levels by 6-fold over control, reaching levels 4 times higher than in the cultivar. Nonetheless, H2O2-detoxifying enzymes were activated, and shoot elongation was sustained in this species, suggesting an efficient Na+ compartmentalization. On the other hand, the domestic cultivar had the highest accumulation of Na+ in roots and showed the lowest ability to sustain growth under combined stress. Leaves of S. habrochaites showed a huge proline buildup under salt stress, whereas S. neorickii and S. galapagense seemed to prevent proline accumulation. S. habrochaites also had high levels of antioxidant metabolites and superoxide dismutase activity under control conditions but downregulated further antioxidant defenses in response to stress exposure. No oxidative damages were noticed despite the almost 2-fold increase in ROS content in the leaves of S. neorickii under salt stress, which showed a negative correlation with growth traits, but an improvement in the antioxidant potential. A principal component analysis (PCA) revealed five PCs with eigenvalues >1, explaining 84 % of the total variability, and suggesting a separation of the evaluated samples mainly in accordance with the type of redox disturbances and antioxidant defenses employed, levels of photosynthetic pigments, balance between Na+ and K+ uptake and proline accumulation. These findings show that wild tomato plants respond differently than cultivated ones under moderate salinity and reduced water availability, suggesting interesting osmoregulatory and antioxidant mechanisms in S. galapagense and S. habrochaites.
Amadi Nioking, Tasie Fidelia, Luiselli Luca
et al.
The village weaver (Ploceus cucullatus) is a common colonial nesting bird widespread throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. It is known to weave its nests from leaf strips from a variety of tree species (mainly coconuts trees, oil palm trees) associated with human settlement areas, grasses, and other available plants. In this regard, this bird was considered a pest for its impact on different economic activities. Although extensive literature is already available on the parasitic role of village weavers, there is still a lack of analytical data that outlines which tree species are used for nesting and in what proportion, as well as the related implications in terms of economic impacts. Here, we carried out the first comprehensive arrangement of trees used by this species for nesting in Southern Nigeria (West Africa), checking for possible different impacts on stakeholders. In April 2021, we searched for village weaver nesting in 95 sites in 77 communities from 24 local government areas in Southern Nigeria, during 14 field surveys. Within each site, we collected GPS coordinates and counted the number of active nests, nesting birds and occupied trees. We recorded a total of 5,776 nests and 2,140 birds in 94 plants belonging to 23 tree species selected for nesting. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis; n = 45) was the most used tree species, as 2,990 (51.77%) nests and 873 (40.79%) birds were recorded. Our results indicate the preference for nesting on trees used by stakeholders belonging to agricultural (palm farmers), touristic (operators) and energy (gas flare stations) sectors with economic implications about the conflict with this pest species.