Test PB Collection: FTE

From the Alfalfa & Forage News blog :: Feb. 18, 2013 Dodder is a troublesome annual parasitic weed that infests alfalfa fields.

California agriculture experienced a nearly three percent increase in the sales value of its products in 2012. The state's 80,500 farms and ranches received a record $44.7 billion for their output last year, up from $43.3 billion in 2011 and $37.9 billion during 2010.

Along about this time of year, the calls come pouring into the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the Bohart Museum of Entomology. "I just saw a golden bumble bee.

While both horseweed and hairy fleabane have been here since farming began in the region, it's only since about 2003 that they have become such an obvious problem, particularly in tree and vine systems and non-crop areas.

Monarchs and milkweed are in the news again. As well they should be. The declining monarch population, coupled with the decreasing scarcity of their host plant, the milkweed, is disturbing. The larvae of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) feed exclusively on milkweeds.

AB1327 is a bill that could potentially impact the work that we do in regards to remote sensing and aerial imagery collection, etc in the near future. See the link below for more detail.

Digital Globe is enlisitng a crowdsourcing effort to scan through thousands of satellite images and tag potential sitings of the Malaysian Aircraft that went missing this weekend.

Thanks to Dave Thau, Karin Tuxen-Bettman, John Bailey, and Emily Henderson who came to visit the GIF and give a demo of the GEE toolbox. We went over the guts of GEE, Timelapse (very cool: make your own! Here is mine), the GEE GUI framework, and the GEE API.

It may not be the farmer's friend, but it's the beekeeper's friend. Wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum), a member of the mustard family, Brassicaceae, is considered a weed, but I consider it a flowering plant for bees when I see it along roadsides and parks and lining orchards and vineyards.

I recently went out to an avocado orchard on sandy soil that had had sudden leaf drop after a Santa Ana condition. The problem is that the orchard had had an ongoing leaf blight problem that had been accentuated by two years of drought and with the Santa Ana more pressure had been put on the trees.