Award Data

for clearing out accumulations of small timber and ground vegetation. However, generations of controversial forest land management practices coupled with global warming trends have yielded wildfires that burn hotter and longer. This beyond ordinary level of devastation can have long lasting effects on the health of soil and watershed resources. The ability to ameliorate these impacts has direct ec ...

Agriculture has seen rapid development in both the quantity and quality of food production; however, the presence of pests and disease on crops can hamper the quality of agricultural pro-duce and can have a devastating effect on a farmer's bottom line.To combat the risk of pest infestations and disease, crop producers rely on a process known as crop scouting. Field-based crop scouting entails ...

The goal of this project is to develop a stand-alone Automated Groundwater Contamination Monitor capable of collecting daily measures of soil and groundwater quality near the perimeter of earthen ponds used to store animal and industrial wastewater. Monitoring wells, mandated by most regulatory agencies, have been shown to be incapable of such rapid and reliable detection and do not offer producer ...

Our main objective is to create hardware and services that will support fire prediction by providing improved capabilities to monitor drought, and by generating better land surface data to feed regional weather models. A second objective is to enable new research into the causesand consequences of wildfire, including studies of post?fire impacts on the hydrology, ecology and geomorphology of the b ...

Nearly 50% of produce is wasted throughout the agricultural supply chain. A significant fraction of this loss is through produce senescence, deterioration with age. In almost all plants, senescence is accelerated by ethylene gas, a hormone that plants produce as they age or are damaged. For decades, 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas has been used to inhibit ethylene action in plants and produce ind ...

The global market for bio-based chemicals is at a critical stage of development. With the focus shifting to development of new bio-based routes to chemicals, new synthesis processes with low capital costs (CAPEX) and high energy efficiency need to be developed that will truly compete with their petroleum derived counterparts. For the market to reach its full potential, techno-economic, health, and ...

It is not currently possible for microalgae processors to determine if Pulsed Electric Field (PEF) treatment of algae is a commercially-attractive proposition within their application when the literature contains such a wide range of reported PEF treatment conditions, leading to unclear and inconsistent baselines. A more controlled approach to determine the effects of PEF on algae is required, whe ...

Semi-automated analysis of citrus grove data from remotely-sensed devices can reduce groundsurveying for appraisal, crop recording, yield analysis, and grove management. Although theygenerally start with the same aerial infrared imagery for their data collection, grove managers andindependent appraisers each have their own independent requirements for data analysis. By making theanalysis of this ...

The proposed project seeks to identify superior strains and families of white bass for aquacultureby evaluating the progeny of three wild strains collected from a broad geographic range. Thecollections will be designed to evaluate the performance of genetically distinct strains. In orderto control for the effect of family differences, five families will be collected from each of thestrains and t ...

A water-borne net coating is described that will prevent biofouling of netting materials used inaquacultural applications. The novel composition functions through the use of trace quantities ofnaturally occurring antifouling compounds. In addition, it contains no volatile organiccompounds (VOC). The proposed technology is especially attractive since it involves onlyenvironmentally benign compon ...