Applied Plant research

The innovation network Waardewerken is a Dutch network of rural entrepreneurs pioneering in multifunctional agriculture. Multifunctional agriculture explicitly aims to fulfil additional functions in the private and public domain, such as nature conservation, green care, recreation and education. The innovation network aims to contribute to a professional multifunctional agriculture sector in the Netherlands. For this purpose it cooperates with researchers and policymakers in order to improve policy conditions and to develop knowledge for multifunctional farmers. In 2007 the achievements during the first four years of this network were evaluated. The Most Significant Change method was used to identify the results of the network. The evaluation showed that the network has had an important role in creating acknowledgement of multifunctional agriculture as a sustainable business strategy among policy makers and other stakeholders. The members of the network are capable to inspire people with their practical and innovative stories about multifunctional agriculture.

Recent advances of network architecture for point cloud processing are mainly driven by new designs of local aggregation operators. However, the impact of these operators to network performance is not carefully investigated due to different overall network architecture and implementation details in each solution. Meanwhile, most of operators are only applied in shallow architectures. In this paper, we revisit the representative local aggregation operators and study their performance using the same deep residual architecture. Our investigation reveals that despite the different designs of these operators, all of these operators make surprisingly similar contributions to the network performance under the same network input and feature numbers and result in the state-of-the-art accuracy on standard benchmarks. This finding stimulate us to rethink the necessity of sophisticated design of local aggregation operator for point cloud processing. To this end, we propose a simple local aggregation operator without learnable weights, named Position Pooling (PosPool), which performs similarly or slightly better than existing sophisticated operators. In particular, a simple deep residual network with PosPool layers achieves outstanding performance on all benchmarks, which outperforms the previous state-of-the methods on the challenging PartNet datasets by a large margin (7.4 mIoU). The code is publicly available at .

One community garden, two communities: a case study Community gardens are associated with a variety of societal benefits. They are considered to create social cohesion and contribute to community building. In this paper we show that the communities that are being created or strengthened on such gardens are not singular, but complex and multiple. In our analysis we build on the work of Blokland (2003). We present a specific community garden in the Netherlands, which is being used by three different groups of people. The garden fulfils the function of a meeting space for two of those groups, that way strengthening internal cohesion. However, both groups assign people to categories ('us' and 'them') on the basis of place of residence, thus strengthening their social identities. Ownership over the garden is both an outcome and a tool in that struggle. This analysis gives insights into the different processes at playof exclusion and separation on the one hand and of inclusion and rapprochement on the otherwhen a garden is used by more than one group. We conclude that shared presence does not necessarily lead to bridging social distances.

Overwintering of soil dwelling arthropods and espec ially carabid beetles was much higher in unmown perennial field margins than in mown grass strips o r barren crop fields. Over 200 generalist predators per m2 were trapped in field margin enclosures afte r hibernation. Predator exclusion experiments showed that high-density aphid colonies in May were reduced by 49% compared to predator-free conditions, both in field margins and in summer whe at crops. Over a 4 years period, aphid infestation levels in summer wheat and potatoes were 15%-65% lower in a farming system with a network of perennial field margins, compared to a system witho ut field margins. However, Diamond back moth and slug damage in Brussels sprouts were higher in the system with field margins compared to the control system without margins.

Stichting Wageningen Research. Alle rechten voorbehouden. Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden verveelvoudigd, opgeslagen in een geautomatiseerd gegevensbestand, of openbaar gemaakt, in enige vorm of op enige wijze, hetzij elektronisch, mechanisch, door fotokopieën, opnamen of enige andere manier zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van Stichting Wageningen Research. Stichting Wageningen Research is niet aansprakelijk voor eventuele schadelijke gevolgen die kunnen ontstaan bij gebruik van gegevens uit deze uitgave. Foto omslag: Oane de Hoop nature to improve the quality of life'. Binnen Wageningen University & Research bundelen Wageningen University en gespecialiseerde onderzoeksinstituten van Stichting Wageningen Research hun krachten om bij te dragen aan de oplossing van belangrijke vragen in het domein van gezonde voeding en leefomgeving. Met ongeveer 30 vestigingen, 7.200 medewerkers (6.400 fte) en 13.200 studenten en ruim 150.000 Leven Lang Leren-deelnemers behoort Wageningen University & Research wereldwijd tot de aansprekende kennisinstellingen binnen haar domein. De integrale benadering van de vraagstukken en de samenwerking tussen verschillende disciplines vormen het hart van de unieke Wageningen aanpak.

N-supply on the rates of photosynthesis and shoot and root respiration of inherently fast-and slow-growing monocotyledonous species.-Physiol. Plant. 89: 563-569. Are there intrinsic differences in the rates of photosynthesis, shoot-and root-respiration between inherently fast-and slow-growing monocotyledons at high and low nitrogen supply? To analyze this question we grew 5 monocotyledons, widely differing in their inherent relative growth rate at high and low nitrogen supply in a growth room. Nitrate was exponentially added to the plants, enabling us to compare inherent differences in plant characteristics, without any effect of species differences in the ability to take up nutrients. At high nitrogen supply, the fast-growing species from productive habitats had a higher photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency and rate of root respiration than the slowgrowing ones from unproductive habitats. Only minor differences were observed in their rates of photosynthesis and shoot respiration per unit leaf area. At low nitrogen supply, the rates of photosynthesis and shoot-and root respiration decreased for all species, even though there were no longer any differences in these processes between inherently fast-and slow-growing species. The photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency increased for all species, and no differences were found among species. Differences in the photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency among species and nitrogen treatments are discussed in terms of the utilization of the photosynthetic apparatus, whereas differences in respiration rate are discussed in terms of the energy demand for growth, maintenance and ion uptake and their related specific respiratory energy costs. It is concluded that the relatively high abundance of slow-growing species compared to fast-growing ones in unproductive habitats is unlikely to be explained by differences in rates of photosynthesis and respiration or in photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency.

Multifunctionele landbouw in Nederland Meer dan boeren alleen Colofon Multifunctionele landbouw in Nederland, meer dan boeren alleen Teksten De interviews en de informatie over de deelsectoren zijn tot stand gekomen onder verantwoordelijkheid van de Taskforce Multifunctionele Landbouw en Roodbont. Auteurs: Tijs Kierkels, Titske Ypma en Judith Kars Alle andere teksten vallen onder de verantwoordelijkheid van PPO Wageningen UR.