• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2005.08a
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• pp.22-46
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• 2005

Spatial and timely information on crop and filed conditions is one of the most important basics for rational and efficient planning and management in agriculture. Remote sensing, GIS, and modeling are powerful tools for such applications. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art in remote sensing of crop and field conditions with some case studies. It is also shown that a synergistic linkage between process-based models and remote sensing signatures enables us to estimate the multiple crop/ecosystem variables at a dynamic mode. Remotely sensed information can greatly reduce the uncertainty of simulation models by compensating for insufficient availability of data or parameters. This synergistic approach allows the effective use of infrequent and multi-source remote sensing data for estimating important ecosystem variables such as biomass growth and ecosystem $CO_2$ flux. This paper also shows a geo-spatial information system that enables us to integrate, search, extract, process, transform, and calculate any part of the data based on ID#, attributes, and/or by river-basin boundary, administrative boundary, or boundaries of arbitrary shape/size all over Japan. A case study using the system demonstrates that the nitrogen load from fertilizer was closely related to nitrate concentration of groundwater. The combined use of remote sensing, GIS and modeling would have great potential for various agro-ecosystem applications.

• Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.99-110
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• 2022

We investigated physicochemical properties and isotopic compositions of organic matter (δ¹³C_TOC and δ ¹⁵N_TN) in the old fish farming (OFF) site after the cessation of aquaculture farming. Based on this approach, our objective is to determine the organic matter origin and their relative contributions preserved at sediments of fish farming. Temporal and spatial distribution of particulate and sinking organic matter(OFF sites: 2.0 to 3.3 mg L^-1 for particulate matter concentration, 18.8 to 246.6 g m^-2 day^-1 for sinking organic matter rate, control sites: 2.0 to 3.5 mg L^-1 for particulate matter concentration, 25.5 to 129.4 g m^-2 day^-1 for sinking organic matter rate) between both sites showed significant difference along seasonal precipitations. In contrast to variations of δ¹³C_TOC and δ¹⁵N_TN values at water columns, these isotopic compositions (OFF sites: -21.5‰ to -20.4‰ for δ¹³ C_TOC, 6.0‰ to 7.6‰ for δ¹⁵N_TN, control sites: -21.6‰ to -21.0‰ for δ¹³C_TOC, 6.6‰ to 8.0‰ for δ¹⁵N_TN) investigated at sediments have distinctive isotopic patterns(p<0.05) for seawater-derived nitrogen sources, indicating the increased input of aquaculture-derived sources (e.g., fish fecal). With respect to past fish farming activities, representative sources(e.g., fish fecal and algae) between both sites showed significant difference (p<0.05), confirming predominant contribution (55.9±4.6%) of fish fecal within OFF sites. Thus, our results may determine specific controlling factor for sustainable use of fish farming sites by estimating the discriminative contributions of organic matter between both sites.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.320-331
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• 2013

The National Center for AgroMeteorology (NCAM) has designed a risk management solution for individual farms threatened by the climate change and variability. The new service produces weather risk indices tailored to the crop species and phenology by using site-specific weather forecasts and analysis derived from digital products of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). If the risk is high enough to cause any damage to the crops, agrometeorological warnings or watches are delivered to the growers' cellular phones with relevant countermeasures to help protect their crops against the potential damage. Core techniques such as scaling down of weather data to individual farm level and the crop specific risk assessment for operational service were developed and integrated into a cloud based service system. The system was employed and implemented in a rural catchment of 50 $km^2$ with diverse agricultural activities and 230 volunteer farmers are participating in this project to get the user-specific weather information from and to feed their evaluations back to NCAM. The experience obtained through this project will be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide early warning service in agricultural sector exposed to the climate and weather extremes under climate change and climate variability.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.33.1-33.10
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• 2022

Background: Endemic circulation of human-specific hepatitis E virus (HEV) genotypes 1 and 2 may occult the importance of sporadic zoonotic HEV transmissions in Africa. Increasing numbers of studies reporting anti-HEV antibodies in cattle and the discovery of infectious HEV in cow milk has raised public health concern, but cattle exposure has seldom been investigated in Africa. Objectives: This study aimed at investigating the role of cows in the epidemiology of HEV in Burkina Faso and farmers habits in terms of dairy product consumption as a prerequisite to estimate the risk of transmission to humans. Methods: Sera from 475 cattle and 192 pigs were screened for the presence of anti-HEV antibodies while HEV RNA in swine stools was detected by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Data on mixed farming, dairy product consumption and selling habits were gathered through questionnaires. Results: The overall seroprevalence in cattle was 5.1% and herd seroprevalence reached 32.4% (11/34). Herd seropositivity was not associated with husbandry practice or presence of rabbits on the farms. However, herd seropositivity was associated with on-site presence of pigs, 80.7% of which had anti-HEV antibodies. The majority of farmers reported to preferentially consume raw milk based dairy products. Conclusions: Concomitant presence of pigs on cattle farms constitutes a risk factor for HEV exposure of cattle. However, the risk of HEV infections associated with raw cow dairy product consumption is currently considered as low.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.275-282
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• 2010

Chloroplast transformation in higher plants offers many attractive advantages over nuclear transformation, including a high-level accumulation of foreign proteins, multi-gene expression in single transformation event via transgene stacking in operons and no position effect due to site-specific integration of transgenes by homologous recombination. Most importantly, chloroplast transgenic plants are eco-friendly because their transgenes are maternally inheritance in most crop plants. However, chloroplast transformation system has limited success in crops alike nuclear transformation. In the past two decades, great progress has been made to overcome the limitations of chloroplast transformation, thus expending chloroplast bioreactor to several important crops including soybean, carrot, lettuce, and oilseed. Therefore, it has become possible that chloroplast transformation of crops can be used not only for the improvement of agronomic traits, but also for the production of vaccines and high valuable therapeutic proteins in pharmaceutical industry.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.159-164
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• 2019

Weed control is a crucial practice not only in organic farming, but also in modern agriculture because it can lead to loss in crop yield. In general, weed is distributed in patches heterogeneously in the field. These patches vary in size, shape, and density. Thus, it would be efficient if chemicals are sprayed on these patches rather than spraying uniformly in the field, which can pollute the environment and be cost prohibitive. In this sense, weed detection could be beneficial for sustainable agriculture. Studies have been conducted to detect weed patches in the field using remote sensing technologies, which can be classified into a method using image segmentation based on morphology and a method with vegetative indices based on the wavelength of light. In this study, the latter methodology has been used to detect the weed patches. As a result, it was found that the vegetative indices were easier to operate as it did not need any sophisticated algorithm for differentiating weeds from crop and soil as compared to the former method. Consequently, we demonstrated that the current method of using vegetative index is accurate enough to detect weed patches, and will be useful for farmers to control weeds with minimal use of chemicals and in a more precise manner.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.403-417
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• 2014

Increased frequency of climate extremes is another face of climate change confronted by humans, resulting in catastrophic losses in agriculture. While climate extremes take place on many scales, impacts are experienced locally and mitigation tools are a function of local conditions. To address this, agrometeorological early warning systems must be place and location based, incorporating the climate, crop and land attributes at the appropriate scale. Existing services often lack site-specific information on adverse weather and countermeasures relevant to farming activities. Warnings on chronic long term effects of adverse weather or combined effects of two or more weather elements are seldom provided, either. This lecture discusses a field-specific early warning system implemented on a catchment scale agrometeorological service, by which volunteer farmers are provided with face-to-face disaster warnings along with relevant countermeasures. The products are based on core techniques such as scaling down of weather information to a field level and the crop specific risk assessment. Likelihood of a disaster is evaluated by the relative position of current risk on the standardized normal distribution from climatological normal year prepared for 840 catchments in South Korea. A validation study has begun with a 4-year plan for implementing an operational service in Seomjin River Basin, which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. Diverse experiences obtained through this study will certainly be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide disaster early warning system for agricultural sector.

• Proceedings of The Korean Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.25-48
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• 2014

Increased frequency of climate extremes is another face of climate change confronted by humans, resulting in catastrophic losses in agriculture. While climate extremes take place on many scales, impacts are experienced locally and mitigation tools are a function of local conditions. To address this, agrometeorological early warning systems must be place and location based, incorporating the climate, crop and land attributes at the appropriate scale. Existing services often lack site-specific information on adverse weather and countermeasures relevant to farming activities. Warnings on chronic long term effects of adverse weather or combined effects of two or more weather elements are seldom provided, either. This lecture discusses a field-specific early warning system implemented on a catchment scale agrometeorological service, by which volunteer farmers are provided with face-to-face disaster warnings along with relevant countermeasures. The products are based on core techniques such as scaling down of weather information to a field level and the crop specific risk assessment. Likelihood of a disaster is evaluated by the relative position of current risk on the standardized normal distribution from climatological normal year prepared for 840 catchments in South Korea. A validation study has begun with a 4-year plan for implementing an operational service in Seomjin River Basin, which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. Diverse experiences obtained through this study will certainly be useful in planning and developing the nation-wide disaster early warning system for agricultural sector.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.369-378
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• 2006

For precision farming the influences of site-specific N application on rice grain yield and quality were investigated in 0.5 ha paddy field from 2001 to 2003. In pre-cultured soil, EC, O.M., total nitrogen, phosphate and potassium content showed high spatial variation, ranging from 11.63 to 52.03% of coefficient of variation, while that of pH was relatively low. In rice growth characteristics, tiller number at panicle formation stage was more than 10% in coefficient of variation, but plant height, SPAD figure at panicle formation stage and milled rice yield, protein content in brown rice showed less below 10%. Spatial dependence was over 0.60 in pH, total nitrogen, phosphate and potassium in pre-cultured soil and was over 0.50 in plant height, SPAD figure and protein content, while it was below 0.22 in tiller number at panicle formation. The range of spatial dependence was longer than 20m in all factors except for protein content in brown rice. Basal dressing nitrogen rate was positively correlated with PH, $SiO_{2}$, plant height and SPAD figure. Nitrogen fertilization rate at panicle formation stage was positively correlated with EC and O.M.. Protein content in brown rice was positively correlated with $SiO_{2}$ in pre-cultured soil. Milled rice yield was positively correlated with plant height, tiller number and SPAD figure at panicle formation stage.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Near Infrared Spectroscopy Conference
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• 2001.06a
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• pp.1062-1062
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• 2001

The concept of “precision agriculture” or “site-specific farming” is usually confined to the fields of soil science, crop science and agronomy. However, because plants grow in soil, animals eat plants, and humans eat animal products, it could be argued (perhaps with some poetic licence) that the fields of feed quality, animal nutrition and animal production should also be considered in this context. NIR spectroscopy has proved over the last 20 years that it can provide a firm foundation for quality measurement across all of these fields, and with the continuing developments in instrumentation, computer capacity and software, is now a major cog in the wheel of precision agriculture. There have been a few giant leaps and a lot of small steps in the impact of NIR on the animal world. These have not been confined to the amazing advances in hardware and software, although would not have occurred without them. Rapid testing of forages, grains and mixed feeds by NIR for nutritional value to livestock is now commonplace in commercial laboratories world-wide. This would never have been possible without the pioneering work done by the USDA NIR Forage Research Network in the 1980's, following the landmark paper of Norris et al. in 1976. The advent of calibration transfer between instruments, algorithms which utilize huge databases for calibration and prediction, and the ability to directly scan whole grains and fresh forages can also be considered as major steps, if not leaps. More adventurous NIR applications have emerged in animal nutrition, with emphasis on estimating the functional properties of feeds, such as in vivo digestibility, voluntary intake, protein degradability and in vitro assays to simulate starch digestion. The potential to monitor the diets of grazing animals by using faecal NIR spectra is also now being realized. NIR measurements on animal carcasses and even live animals have also been attempted, with varying degrees of success, The use of discriminant analysis in these fields is proving a useful tool. The latest giant leap is likely to be the advent of relatively low-cost, portable and ultra-fast diode array NIR instruments, which can be used “on-site” and also be fitted to forage or grain harvesters. The fodder and livestock industries are no longer satisfied with what we once thought was revolutionary: a 2-3 day laboratory turnaround for fred quality testing. This means that the instrument needs to be taken to the samples rather than vice versa. Considerable research is underway in this area, but the challenge of calibration transfer and maintenance of instrument networks of this type remains. The animal world is currently facing its biggest challenges ever; animal welfare, alleged effects of animal products on human health, environmental and economic issues are difficult enough, but the current calamities of BSE and foot and mouth disease are “the last straw” NIR will not of course solve all these problems, but is already proving useful in some of these areas and will continue to do so.