Indica-japonica hybrid rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars showed high yield potential and poor tasting quality when compared with common japonica rice cultivars.  Large panicle is a prominent factor of high yield for indica-japonica hybrid rice cultivars, and the panicle weight varies greatly among different indica-japonica hybrid rice cultivars.  It is important to research on yield and grain quality of different panicle weight indica-japonica hybrid rice cultivars.  In this study, two different panicle types indica-japonica hybrid cultivars were used to research on the relation of yield and grain quality.  The yields of two heavy panicle weights indica-japonica hybrid cultivars were significantly higher than that of two medium panicle weight rice cultivars.  The cooking and eating quality and starch properties of different panicle type cultivars were evaluated.  Yongyou 6715 (medium panicle) and Yongyou 1852 (heavy panicle) got the relatively higher cooking and eating quality.  Rice cultivars with medium panicle weight had more large starch granules and higher relative crystallinity than cultivars with heavy panicle weight.  Transition temperature and retrogradation enthalpy (ΔH_ret) of medium panicle type cultivars were significantly higher than that of heavy panicle type cultivars.  There was no significant difference in amylose content among different panicle type cultivars.  Protein content of heavy panicle type cultivar was higher than that of medium panicle type cultivar, and protein content is the main factor affect cooking and eating quality in this study.  The cultivar Yongyou 6715 got the highest taste value with the lowest protein content.  Thus, it is suggested that the emphasis on improving rice cooking and eating quality of indica-japonica hybrid rice cultivars is how to reduce the protein content in rice grain.  According to the results of this study, medium panicle type with high grain weight is the desired panicle type for high quality indica-japonica hybrid rice breeding.

 

Monitoring pest populations in paddy fields is important to effectively implement integrated pest management.  Light traps are widely used to monitor field pests all over the world.  Most conventional light traps still involve manual identification of target pests from lots of trapped insects, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive and error-prone, especially in pest peak periods.  In this paper, we developed an automatic monitoring system for rice light-trap pests based on machine vision.  This system is composed of an intelligent light trap, a computer or mobile phone client platform and a cloud server.  The light trap firstly traps, kills and disperses insects, then collects images of trapped insects and sends each image to the cloud server.  Five target pests in images are automatically identified and counted by pest identification models loaded in the server.  To avoid light-trap insects piling up, a vibration plate and a moving rotation conveyor belt are adopted to disperse these trapped insects.  There was a close correlation (r=0.92) between our automatic and manual identification methods based on the daily pest number of one-year images from one light trap.  Field experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of our automatic light trap monitoring system.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is the sum of soil or water body evaporation and plant transpiration from the earth surface and ocean to the atmosphere, and thus plays a significant role in regulating carbon and water resource cycles.  The time-series data set from the remote sensing MOIDS product (MOD16) was used to study the spatial-temporal evolution of vegetation evapotranspiration in salinized areas during 2000–2014 by analyzing the variability, spatial patterns and Mann-Kendall (MK) nonparametric trends for the time series.  The results indicate that inter-annual and intra-annual variations of ET across various vegetated areas show seasonal changes, with the abnormal months identified.  The cultivated land displays a greater degree of spatial heterogeneity and the spatial pattern of ET in the area covered by broadleaved deciduous forests corresponds to a higher ET rate and increased water consumption.  A widespread decline of ET is observed only in cultivated areas.  However, agricultural cultivation doesn’t worsen water shortage and soil salinization problems in the region, and water shortage problems are worsening for other vegetated areas.  This research provides a basis of reference for the reasonable allocation of water resources and restructuring of vegetation patterns in salinized areas.