Archive for the ‘agriculture’ Category
Irrigation is an artificial application of water to the soil. It is used to assist in the growing of agricultural crops, maintenance of landscapes, and revegetation of disturbed soils in dry areas and during periods of inadequate rainfall. Additionally, irrigation also has a few other uses in crop production, which include protecting plants against frost,[1] suppressing weed growing in grain fields[2] and helping in preventing soil consolidation.[3] In contrast, agriculture that relies only on direct rainfall is referred to as rain-fed or dryland farming. Irrigation systems are also used for dust suppression, disposal of sewage, and in mining. Irrigation is often studied together with drainage, which is the natural or artificial removal of surface and sub-surface water from a given area.
Irrigation is also a term used in medical/dental fields to refer to flushing and washing out anything with water or another liquid.
A pesticide is any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest.[1] A pesticide may be a chemical substance, biological agent (such as a virus or bacterium), antimicrobial, disinfectant or device used against any pest. Pests include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, molluscs, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, spread disease or are a vector for disease or cause a nuisance. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, there are also drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals. FAO has defined the term of pesticide as:
any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying or controlling any pest, including vectors of human or animal disease, unwanted species of plants or animals causing harm during or otherwise interfering with the production, processing, storage, transport or marketing of food, agricultural commodities, wood and wood products or animal feedstuffs, or substances which may be administered to animals for the control of insects, arachnids or other pests in or on their bodies. The term includes substances intended for use as a plant growth regulator, defoliant, desiccant or agent for thining fruit or preventing the premature fall of fruit, and substances applied to crops either before or after harvest to protect the commodity from deterioration during storage and transport.
Ecology (from Greek: ?????, “house” or “living relations”; -?????, “study of”) is the scientific study of the distributions, abundance and relations of organisms and their interactions with the environment.[1] Ecology includes the study of plant and animal populations, plant and animal communities and ecosystems. Ecosystems describe the web or network of relations among organisms at different scales of organization. Since ecology refers to any form of biodiversity, ecologists research everything from tiny bacteria’s role in nutrient recycling to the effects of tropical rain forest on the Earth’s atmosphere. The discipline of ecology emerged from the natural sciences in the late 19th century. Ecology is not synonymous with environment, environmentalism, or environmental science.[1][2][3] Ecology is closely related to the disciplines of physiology, evolution, genetics and behavior.[4]
Like many of the natural sciences, a conceptual understanding of ecology is found in the broader details of study, including:
* life processes explaining adaptations
* distribution and abundance of organisms
* the movement of materials and energy through living communities
* the successional development of ecosystems, and
* the abundance and distribution of biodiversity in context of the environment.[1][2][3]
Ecology is distinguished from natural history, which deals primarily with the descriptive study of organisms. It is a sub-discipline of biology, which is the study of life.
There are many practical applications of ecology in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agriculture, forestry, fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic & applied science and it provides a conceptual framework for understanding and researching human social interaction (human ecology)