This chapter focuses on ideotype breeding for improving the yield and related traits, abiotic stress resistance, and quality of grain and forage sorghum. Ideotype breeding involves defining and breeding for the target traits to reach the objectives and differs from classical plant breeding which...

This chapter discusses the reproduction and social behaviour of domestic animals on the following topics: reproductive efforts; sensory factors in reproduction; hormonal and pheromonal facilitation; and seasonal and climatic breeding responses.

This chapter examines the key climatic driving factors for changes in the incidence of Lyme disease and explores how these depend on the level of global warming. It aims to provide some context for the more detailed expert opinions in this book as well as to show how the key climatic driving...

This expert opinion provides an overview of mathematical models that have been used to assess the impact of climate change on ticks and tick-borne diseases, ways forward in terms of improving models for the recent context and broad guidelines for conducting future climate change risk assessment.

The effect of climate on the evolution of tick populations remains difficult to disentangle from other possible causes and undoubtedly varies depending on the region concerned and local tick species. Large-scale, long-term monitoring is, therefore, necessary to accurately assess climatic impact on...

All commercial sweet cherry trees are either budded or grafted. This chapter deals with sweet cherry rootstocks. Rootstocks are used for several purposes: (i) ease for propagating and producing more trees of a superior cultivar; (ii) better adaptation to particular soil or site characteristics; and ...

Growing fruit trees is a long term financial commitment and establishing an orchard is an expensive enterprise. Selecting the right orchard site is arguably the most important decision that a sweet cherry grower will make and it will affect all other managerial decisions related to the orchard....

This chapter focuses on the importance of managing the orchard environment for a sustainable sweet cherry production, i.e. fertilizer application, irrigation and crop-weed competition, among others. The influence of some climate-related environmental factors on sweet cherry production are also...

This chapter focused on the control of M. hyopneumoniae aside from antibiotic treatment and vaccine application, also an overview of the most prominent factors affecting M. hyopneumoniae disease development and clinical presentation are discussed in detail in different sections of this chapter.

The distribution and survival of a tick species are affected by several factors such as host availability, vegetation coverage, climatic conditions (humidity, photoperiod and temperature) and anthropic activities. This expert opinion discusses the differences between both tropical and temperate R....