Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

About: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is a facility organization based out in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Soil water. The organization has 10921 authors who have published 21332 publications receiving 748193 citations. The organization is also known as: Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Nitrogen Dynamics and Indices to Predict Soil Nitrogen Supply in Humid Temperate Soils

Abstract: Knowledge of the nitrogen (N) available to crops during the growing season is essential for improving fertilizer-use efficiency and minimizing the adverse impacts of N losses on the environment. In humid temperate regions, soil N supply is dominated by in-season N mineralization because plant-available N (NH 4 –N and NO 3 –N) is transformed to nonlabile forms or lost from the soil–plant system during fall and winter. The microbially mediated reactions that generate the soil N supply in agroecosystems are affected by system-specific conditions, including soil properties, agricultural management (crop rotation, tillage system, organic amendments), and most importantly, climate. Potentially mineralizable N ( N 0 ) determined from long-term soil incubation is regarded as the standard measure of soil N mineralization potential and may provide a good approximation of the soil N supply. However, this method is time consuming and not practical for routine use. Several chemical methods to estimate the N mineralization potential of soils are discussed in this chapter. The major limitation of chemical methods is that they cannot simulate the microbial-mediated release of plant-available N under field conditions. Consequently, any single chemical method may not be a good predictor of soil N supply. Thus, we suggest a holistic approach to estimate soil N supply in humid temperate regions, which involves (1) the use of a combination of N indices together with weather data and (2) identification and quantification of a specific fraction (s) of organic N that is the dominant contributor (s) to N supply in a particular system.

Barcoding Bugs: DNA-Based Identification of the True Bugs (Insecta: Hemiptera: Heteroptera)

Abstract: Background DNA barcoding, the analysis of sequence variation in the 5' region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene, has been shown to provide an efficient method for the identification of species in a wide range of animal taxa. In order to assess the effectiveness of barcodes in the discrimination of Heteroptera, we examined 344 species belonging to 178 genera, drawn from specimens in the Canadian National Collection of Insects. Methodology/principal findings Analysis of the COI gene revealed less than 2% intra-specific divergence in 90% of the taxa examined, while minimum interspecific distances exceeded 3% in 77% of congeneric species pairs. Instances where barcodes fail to distinguish species represented clusters of morphologically similar species, except one case of barcode identity between species in different genera. Several instances of deep intraspecific divergence were detected suggesting possible cryptic species. Conclusions/significance Although this analysis encompasses 0.8% of the described global fauna, our results indicate that DNA barcodes will aid the identification of Heteroptera. This advance will be useful in pest management, regulatory and environmental applications and will also reveal species that require further taxonomic research.