Foreign Plants Research Articles

Wild pollinator communities are negatively affected by invasion of alien goldenrods in grassland landscapes

The increasing spread of invasive alien plants has changed biodiversity throughout the world. To date research in this area has focused on how invasive plant species affect pollinator behaviour, but there is a lack of data on the impact that alien plant species have on wild pollinator populations. Since their introduction in the 19th century, and rapid spread after the 1950s, alien goldenrods ( Solidago canadensis, Solidago gigantea) have been among the most successful invasive plant species in Europe. We studied the effects of goldenrods on wild pollinator communities in SE Poland. The abundance, species richness and diversity of wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies were compared between wet meadows invaded by goldenrod (10 transects) and non-invaded controls (10 transects). Furthermore, we compared the plant diversity and average cover between the two groups of sites. Invasion of goldenrods had a very strong negative effect on wild pollinator diversity as well as abundance. Plant diversity and average cover were also negatively affected by goldenrod invasion. Wild pollinators were grouped according to their nesting and food specialization, but none were resistant to the invasion, indicating that introduced goldenrod may affect the entire wild pollinator community. Our study emphasises the urgent need to develop specific protection plans for wild pollinators in habitats threatened by foreign plants and we call for the introduction of programs to stop the invasion of goldenrod not only in Poland, but also on a continental scale.

Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. By Philip J. Pauly. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv, 336 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02663-6.)

Philip J. Pauly moves the story of plant introduction, plant breeding, and pest control out of the history of horticultural science into the much broader and ideologically freighted framework of “culture”—in the eighteenth-century, not the twentieth-century, use of that word, he hastens to add. The ideas and activities of America's gentleman gardeners, professional nurserymen, landscape designers, scientists, and government bureaucrats were never just about plants. Inevitably, their work resonated with multiple meanings, reflecting and addressing the many ways Americans linked their physical environment to their nation's postcolonial identity. Did the American environment invariably lead to the degeneration of living things, or could it in time develop an advanced culture? Did indigenous varieties represent the highest potential and pride of the American environment? Could foreign varieties be naturalized into the American continent? Or was it best to keep out aliens altogether? Those questions frame the meaning of the horticultural events and issues Pauly details: Thomas Jefferson's anxious gardening agenda; the postrevolutionary “invasion” of the purposefully named Hessian fly; the competing visions of improvement represented by native and naturalized fruits; the varied approaches to the problem of the treeless prairie; federal distribution of foreign plants as a form of economic engineering; the political debates over plant quarantines; the clash of nativist and cosmopolitan styles of American landscape gardening; the possibilities, botanical and otherwise, presented by America's only semitropical landscape, south Florida; and the transformation of horticulture and its practitioners in an age of scientific expertise and state power. Pauly's research is stunning. He mines obscure periodicals, transactions, treatises, and textbooks and brings to life the dullest of government reports. He offers fresh perspectives on such familiar figures as A. J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted; introduces such new figures as the nurseryman and horticultural journalist Charles Hovey and the United States Department of Agriculture entomologist Charles Marlatt; and includes such unexpected characters as Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, horticultural missionaries to the West and South, respectively.

A meta-analysis of local adaptation in plants.

Local adaptation is of fundamental importance in evolutionary, population, conservation, and global-change biology. The generality of local adaptation in plants and whether and how it is influenced by specific species, population and habitat characteristics have, however, not been quantitatively reviewed. Therefore, we examined published data on the outcomes of reciprocal transplant experiments using two approaches. We conducted a meta-analysis to compare the performance of local and foreign plants at all transplant sites. In addition, we analysed frequencies of pairs of plant origin to examine whether local plants perform better than foreign plants at both compared transplant sites. In both approaches, we also examined the effects of population size, and of the habitat and species characteristics that are predicted to affect local adaptation. We show that, overall, local plants performed significantly better than foreign plants at their site of origin: this was found to be the case in 71.0% of the studied sites. However, local plants performed better than foreign plants at both sites of a pair-wise comparison (strict definition of local adaption) only in 45.3% of the 1032 compared population pairs. Furthermore, we found local adaptation much more common for large plant populations (>1000 flowering individuals) than for small populations (<1000 flowering individuals) for which local adaptation was very rare. The degree of local adaptation was independent of plant life history, spatial or temporal habitat heterogeneity, and geographic scale. Our results suggest that local adaptation is less common in plant populations than generally assumed. Moreover, our findings reinforce the fundamental importance of population size for evolutionary theory. The clear role of population size for the ability to evolve local adaptation raises considerable doubt on the ability of small plant populations to cope with changing environments.

The Crystal Palace, environmentally considered

In the nineteenth century, horticulturists such as John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, aware of the new environmental possibilities of glasshouses that had been demonstrated in the context of horticulture, contemplated the use of fully-glazed structures as a means to creating new types of environments for human beings. While Loudon suggested the use of large glass structures to immerse entire Russian villages in an artificial climate, Henry Cole and Paxton envisioned large-scale winter parks, to function as new types of public spaces. These indoor public spaces were intended to grant the urban population of London access to clean air, daylight and a comfortable climate. Although glasshouses had only been experienced in the immediate context of horticulture, designed in accordance with the specific environmental requirements of foreign plants, rather than the requirements of human comfort and health, they were perceived as a precedent for a new approach to architectural design primarily driven by environmental criteria. The environmental design principles of horticulture were discussed extensively in nineteenth-century horticultural literature such Loudon's Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses (1817), Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1834-49) and the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1812-44). Since the purpose of glasshouses was to facilitate the cultivation of an increasing variety of foreign plants in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, the creation of artificial climates tailored to the specific environmental needs of plants became the primary object of the design.

The spatial scale of adaptive population differentiation in a wide‐spread, well‐dispersed plant species

Adaptation to the specific conditions at different sites may contribute strongly to the wide distribution of a plant species. However, little is known about the scale at which such adaptation occurs in common species. We studied population differentiation, plasticity and local adaptation of the short‐lived perennial Hypochoeris radicata, a widespread and common plant whose seeds are well‐dispersed. We reciprocally transplanted seedlings among several populations of different size within and among three European regions (in the northwest Czech Republic, central Germany and the central Netherlands) and studied several fitness‐related traits over two growing seasons. The region in which the reciprocal transplant experiment was carried out had no influence on the performance of seedlings, indicating that there were no differences in overall habitat quality. In contrast, the site within region, and the plot within site strongly influenced mean plant performance. Plants from different populations of origin differed in their performance, indicating genetic variation among populations, but performance strongly depended on the specific combination of population of origin and transplant site. Plants that grew at their home site produced on average almost twice the number of seeds per transplant (a multiplicative fitness measure) than foreign plants originating from other sites. Survival, rosette size and multiplicative fitness all decreased with increasing distance from the home site to the transplant site. The size of the population of origin did not influence overall plant performance or the strength of local adaptation. In conclusion, our results indicate that the common and widespread H. radicata consists of locally adapted genotypes within its European range at a relatively small scale. Thus a large potential for gene flow by seeds and a high density of populations do not appear to be sufficient to prevent population differentiation by selection.

Competencies in subsidiaries of multinational companies

Abstract In order to better understand the competitiveness of companies and with this their surrounding regions, economic geographers focus on competencies in manufacturing companies. This paper discusses the major and minor driving forces, preconditions and constraints for transferring tasks from headquarters to the foreign plant. Subsidiaries of international automotive supply companies in Poland are used as case studies, offering insights into different types of competencies assigned from headquarters to the subsidiary

한국 의류산업의 대미(對美) 수출 현황과 소싱 특성

In recent years, Korea`s apparel exports to the USA have faced a great threat, as the trade environment around the world has changed continually. purpose of this study is to analyze the competitive position of Korean apparel exports to the USA, and to enhance export competitiveness by applying to offshore sourcing. trade data of the Office of Textiles and Apparel(OTEXA) in the U.S. Department of Commerce were selected for inquiry about export competitiveness of apparel products made in Korea. In addition, we targeted members of the Korea Apparel Industry Association among the 500 exporters of clothing items in The Import and Export Textile Product 2003. A total 70 sheets were analyzed. results of this study were as follows: 1) Korean apparel exports to USA have decreased by 20-35 percent per year since 2005 under the Free Trade Area, showing that Korean apparel industries have not adapted to the new trade environment. Although Korean apparel exports to USA have indicated a trade surplus from now on, Korean apparel industries should find new ways to overcome this situation, diminishing exports and increasing imports. 2) Korean apparel companies selected more offshore sourcing than domestic sourcing. Also, as Korean apparel companies manufactured apparel products offshore, foreign subcontracting outranked manufacturing in their own foreign plants. When they chose foreign countries to source, they turned mainly to China and Vietnam. Also, they considered the target country`s manufacturing price, labor stability, apparel products, quality, lead time, and so on. In order to increase apparel exports, Korean apparel industries should focus more on developing competitively new apparel products, improving the ability of sourcing management, and establishing on-the-spot agencies.

Multinationals and plant exit: Evidence from Chile

This paper investigates three main questions: are affiliates of foreign multinationals more likely to exit than domestic firms? Does the exit probability of multinationals depend on its export orientation?, and Does the presence of multinationals affect the survival of other firms in the economy? Our results show that foreign plants are more likely to exit the economy, controlling for other firm and industry characteristics, only during the late 1990s, a period when the Chilean economy experience a massive slowdown. Our data also suggest that only domestic market oriented multinationals responded to this negative shock by being more “footloose”. We also find that the presence of multinationals has a positive effect on plant survival in the early 1990s. This positive effect, however, is fully captured by productivity, once controlling for TFP in our exit regressions we do not find any further impact of multinational presence on a plant's probability of exit.

Ethanolic extracts of herbal supplement Equiguard™ suppress growth and control gene expression in CWR22Rv1 cells representing the transition of prostate cancer from androgen dependence to hormone refractory status

Dietary supplements and botanical products are widely used by patients diagnosed with prostate cancer (CaP) as a primary or adjuvant form of treatment for their medical conditions in the United States. Many of the available products are complex mixtures composed of extracts from foreign plants, whose mechanism of action typically is not systematically and rigorously investigated. Laboratory studies employing precisely defined conditions and referenced methodologies are essential not only for standardization and characterization of the products, but are also important requisites for providing scientific evidence and molecular insights in regard to the clinical efficacies some of these products purportedly demonstrate. In previous studies from this laboratory, we serendipitously observed that Equiguard, a dietary supplement formulated with extracts from nine Chinese herbs for preventing decline in renal functions associated with the aging process, contain 70% ethanol-extractable ingredients that displayed potent growth inhibitory activities in androgen-dependent (AD) LNCaP and androgen-independent (AI) DU-145 and PC-3 cells. Moreover, significant reduction in expression of the androgen receptor (AR) and prostate specific antigen (PSA) also occurred in Equiguard-treated LNCaP cells. Although these results offer the possibility that Equiguard confers chemoprevention for CaP, it remains undetermined whether Equiguard functions in CaP cell types that represent the transition of AD to the AI status. Further, details of its mechanism of action have not been fully elucidated. The studies described in this report focusing on CWR22Rv1 cells are intended to fill these gaps. These cells express AR and PSA, yet show weak responsiveness to androgens and largely proliferate in an AI-independent manner - features that mimic AD --> AI in clinically advanced disease. Using the CWR22Rv1 cells, we showed that 70% ethanolic extracts of Equiguard effectively suppressed colony formation, inhibited cell proliferation, reduced expression of cell cycle regulatory proteins including cyclin D1, E2F, as well as lowered AR and PSA levels. Treatment of CWR22Rv1 cells with Equiguard also decreased cyclooxygenase 2 and led to increases in quinone reductase 1 and 2. These results provide further support that Equiguard possess multiple, chemopreventive attributes capable of disrupting the transition of AD --> AI in clinically advanced CaP.

Stellwagen Bank

Stellwagen Bank Lydia Peelle (bio) I've been down in the graveyard, most days this winter, thinking about our forefathers, our foremothers, the future and what might meet us there. It is February in Provincetown, on the outer reach of the Cape Cod peninsula. The wind whips in with the accumulated energy of three thousand unbroken miles across the Atlantic, the sun slips over the horizon early in the evenings—there's time to think about things. I read names and inscriptions, figure ages from dates, search for some sort of story, some kind of clue. Something more about the lives these stones are meant to memorialize—something more about that dash between the dates. Something of the hope and grief of these generations, the mothers and fathers who worked themselves to the ground and grave to carve out lives for their daughters and sons. Something of the people dedicated to the wealth and the liberty of a small plot of land by the sea—here on this spit, this curling arm of sand—here on the edge, the tip, the end, the very end, of this continent. For years, resourceful men and women scavenged what washed ashore of shipwrecks all along the outer arm of the Cape. These are dangerous, shoal-riddled waters, and there was never any shortage of plunder. In 1840, after the Franklin wrecked in shallow waters just off Ballston Beach, people came down to the dunes and watched for days as lifeboats tried and failed to save the doomed passengers and crew. An old man who lived out in Wellfleet opened a chest that washed up and found several unmarked packets of seeds. Seeing opportunity, he took them home and planted them in his garden. Months later, when Henry Thoreau happened to pass through, the old man and his wife had been living all summer off of the foreign plants that grew from those seeds. Henry spent the night, and as he was leaving the next day, the old man took him gently by the arm. You're a man of science. You've seen some things. Come on out to my garden and tell me what we've been eating. So Henry went out to the garden with him and gave a name to each plant in turn. The mystery was revealed as if a cloth had been pulled off the garden plot, as in a magic trick. Broccoli. Cabbage. Parsley. On the edge of the sea, we are all of us scavengers. Crabs pick at bones. Gulls squawk and drop urchin shells on the graveyard road to shatter. What can we salvage, drag home over the dunes? I want to plant the [End Page 66] washed-up seeds. See what comes up. Harvest the stories of the dead. What can they tell me of the life that lies ahead, a future that seems to grow more uncertain by the hour? On a tomb set in the side of a hill beside the graveyard road, three names share one granite plaque: Captain James Small and his two sons, James and Joshua, Lost at Sea, September, 1846. There is one other plaque set in the side of the tomb: Betsey, mother and wife. Who died seven months later, according to the inscription, broken hearted at her loss. But how did her heart break, I need to know. Did it shatter? Did it crack? Did it tear along the seams? Did it rust out slowly, in the salt air, or did Betsey, overcome by loss, walk out into the ocean one morning, out towards her sons and husband, and simply let her heart fill up with seawater? In the deep ocean, there falls a snow: tiny bits of bone and teeth and scale, the remains of plants and animals always sifting, always swirling through the strata. We here on land have not much more than this—fragments, slivers, chips of bone—but it is all we have to work with. I am beginning to think that it all may come down to something about grief. Dorothy Bradford, I think of you. From atop the Small family's hill in the graveyard, one can look out over...

Foreign Ownership, Competition, and Survival Dynamics

The impact of foreign direct investment on host countries’ industrial sectors has received considerable attention. It is shown by many researchers that foreign plants are more productive than are domestic ones, but the empirical evidence regarding spillovers is not unambiguous. In this paper, we suggest that the impact of foreign direct investment on local industry hinges on the dynamics of foreign and domestic plants—i.e., on entry and selection (exit) processes. Our analysis of foreign investment and competition dynamics in Turkish manufacturing industry for the period 1983–2001 indicates that foreign plants have a better performance level than do domestic ones when they are first established in the local market, and, subsequently, are more likely to survive but; the difference in survival probabilities disappears when the industry and/or plant characteristics are controlled for. Moreover, foreign presence seems to have no long-term effect on the survival prospects of domestic plants.

Manufacturing strategy and innovation in indigenous and foreign firms: an international study

This paper examines manufacturing strategy and innovation as determinants of competitiveness by comparing indigenous and foreign firms from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS). To this end, we consider indigenous firms, those operating in their home country of origin whereas foreign firms are those who operate outside their home country in foreign host country settings. Manufacturing strategy is examined through clearly distinguished manufacturing priorities, practices and performance. This paper takes the perspective of the Resource Based View (RBV), which sees competitiveness as 'deploying resources in a distinctive way' through a combination of priorities and practices. In examining manufacturing strategy and innovation, we detected a number of differences and similarities between indigenous and foreign plants using data gathered in 17 countries. Although there is growing empirical evidence showing that international firms perform better in almost all areas than their domestic counterparts, we found that innovative firms are more competitive regardless of their origin.

Saving Taxes Through Foreign Plant Ownership

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We employ a model of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership to derive a set of empirically testable hypotheses about the differential taxation of foreign- and domestically-owned subsidiaries. We assess these hypotheses in a dataset of 33,577 European foreign- and domestically-owned manufacturing plants. We identify a significant tax-saving of endogenous foreign ownership. On average, foreign owners pay 594 Euros per employee or about 56 percent less than domestic owners of similar subsidiaries. This effect is larger in thinner markets with fewer plants, in markets with a greater relative presence of foreign owners, and for foreign owners of larger plants.

Correlation between the In Vitro antioxidant activity and polyphenol content of aqueous extracts from bulgarian herbs

The water phase antioxidant activity of extracts from 23 Bulgarian medicinal plants was studied in relation to their polyphenol content in comparison with mate, black tea, honeybush and rooibos foreign species. Antioxidant activity was measured by the ABTS (2,2'-azinobis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid)) cation radical decolorization assay, and the total polyphenol content was assayed according to the Folin-Ciocalteu method. Five Bulgarian plant extracts exhibited higher antioxidant activity than that of mate, which is 21.7% of all Bulgarian herbs included in this study. These were Alchemilla vulgaris L. (4.79 +/- 0.14 mm), Sambucus ebulus L. (4.03 +/- 0.07 mm), Mentha spicata L. (3.90 +/- 0.03 mm), Fragaria vesca L. (3.74 +/- 0.06 mm), Crataegus monogyna Jacq. (3.63 +/- 0.05 mm). Another eight Bulgarian medicinal plant extracts exhibited an intermediate antioxidant activity - lower than that of mate and higher than that of honeybush, which makes 34.8% of all Bulgarian herbs included in the study. More than half of the herbal extracts included in the present study exhibited antioxidant activity higher than or comparable to the reference foreign plants. A positive correlation (r = 0.92) between antioxidant activity and polyphenol content was found, suggesting that the antioxidant capacity of the aqueous plant extracts is due to a great extent to their polyphenols.

Invasion and control of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) in China

By the time of primary 21st century, water hyacinth had become a serious environmental problem in China. Water hyacinth contributes to the major part of ecological hazards from the invasion of foreign plant species, which is estimated about USD 7 billion a year in values. In the past 10 years, herbicides glyphosate, 2,4-D and paraquat have been used in controlling water hyacinth in China. Although the herbicides provided effective control on the weed in some areas, they could not provide the sustainable inhibition on the weed population, while would lead to pollution of water at various levels. At present, the herbicide application on water hyacinth is forbidden in many areas of China such as Shanghai. In this situation, the asexual reproduction inhibitor, KWH02, was invented for controlling water hyacinth and it provided about 70% of growth inhibition without any risk of dead plant pollution. It has been about 10 years for bio-control of water hyacinth in China. Works focused on mainly the efficacy and safety of the utilization of foreign insects. Researches on microorganism herbicides to control water hyacinth were started and obtained primary achievements in recent years. Although there are different opinion on how to face the water hyacinth problem in China, it is accepted widely that the control methods should be high efficient and safe with low cost. Some practical measures for integrated management of water hyacinth are suggested.

Agglomeration Economies and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Romania

How important are agglomeration economies for the location of foreign manufacturing plants? We investigate this question by combining innovations from previous studies and by taking advantage of a quasi-experimental setting: the political and economic transition in Romania. The recent, sudden and sustained influx of foreign investors into Romania provides an ideal setting to disentangle agglomeration economies from endowment effects. Using a countylevel conditional logit set-up that controls for choice-specific fixed effects and endowment effects, we find that external economies from industry-specific foreign agglomeration and service agglomeration are important location determinants. Increases in the number of foreign plants and in service employment density by 10 percent make the average county 2.2 and 6.2 percent more likely to attract a new foreign investor. Local labor market conditions also matter. Our findings suggest that results are sensitive to the choice of geographical unit of observation and the inclusion of locational fixed effects.

Plant Breeding in the U.S. Private Sector

In summary, in 1994 there were about twice as many breeding jobs in the private than the public sector, and three times as many positions were devoted to agronomic compared to horticultural crops, with breeding positions divided nearly equally between large and small companies. Most likely similar distributions occur today and will continue in the nearto midterm. Therefore, education and training of future breeders should be relevant to the employment prevalent in the profession as well as prepare them to meet changes that will most certainly occur throughout their career. This is true whether the career is in the private or public sector; with agronomic or horticultural crops; in the national and international sectors, and with the same or different companies. There is little reason to believe that the need for new crop cultivars will diminish in the future because the demand for food and other plant-derived products will increase along with population growth and limited arable land. The actual number of new breeders hired for specifi c types of breeding activities will undoubtedly change as will the number and types of companies hiring them. Consolidation of private-sector companies engaged in cultivar development continues, but at the same time new ventures are being developed to meet demands for different products in emerging sectors. Accurate predictions of the number of new breeders needed to replace the current supply are diffi cult. However, if in the U.S. we assume an annual turnover of from 2% to 5%, 15 to 35 replacement positions will be available each year in the public sector and from 30 to 75 positions in the private sector. The number of students receiving advanced plant breeding degrees in the U.S. during the years 1995 to 2000 (Guner and Wehner, 2003) appears to match reasonably well the number of breeding jobs available, based on the estimated annual turnover rates. They estimated that 770 domestic and foreign plant breeding students were trained at land-grant universities, of which 360 were domestic and 410 were international in origin. Of this group, 411 received the PhD and 359 an MS degree. These fi gures do not take into account the diverse types of education they received or different types of activities they assumed when employed.

Technological Asymmetries and Strategic Plant Location: The Case of Export-Platform Foreign Direct Investment

We consider the plant location decision of a multinational corporation (MNC), which has the option to invest in a more or in a less technologically lagging country, and which aims to use its foreign plant as an export-platform. We show that the plant location decision of the MNC depends on whether the host country firms can export, and on whether they are able to compete in the product market. We also show that a conflict of interest does not necessarily arise between the plant location decision of the MNC and the preferences of the host countries' governments.

Labor Productivity and Foreign Direct Investment in Irish Manufacturing Industry: A Decomposition Analysis

Overall labor productivity in the Irish manufacturing sector increased by 158 percent between 1991 and 1999. This growth in labor productivity coincided with strong growth in employment during the same period, in stark contrast to the experience of other European countries. This paper examines the components of this labor productivity growth in the period 1991-1999, using a decomposition analysis based on plant level data. In order to account for the large presence of foreign plants, we carry out our analysis separately for foreign and domestic plants, as well as for four ownership subgroups, four sectoral subgroups, and two time sub-periods. Our results show that although the main drivers of average labor productivity growth in all groups arise within plant and from plant entry, there are marked differences in the relative sizes of these effects across the ownership/sector/time-period.

Employment dynamics in foreign and domestic plants: Evidence from Irish manufacturing

In this paper we investigate the driving factors behind the diverse employment performances of indigenous and foreign‐owned (multinational) plants in Ireland. Examining aggregate job creation and job destruction rates we find that the net gain of the foreign sector in Irish manufacturing employment was due to a considerably lower rate of job destruction and a slightly higher job creation rate. An econometric investigation into the determinants of net employment growth at the plant level lends further credence to the argument that foreign plants performed better than domestic plants. Even after controlling for a number of plant and sector specific effects, multinationals experienced greater net employment growth rates than their indigenous counterparts.