The college has six campuses around the north-east of Northern Ireland (County Antrim and eastern County Londonderry): Ballymena (Trostan Avenue and Farm Lodge campuses), Ballymoney, Coleraine, Magherafelt and Newtownabbey. It also had a campus in Antrim and Larne but these have closed.
Efficient and verifiable autonomous herbicide application on municipal pavements remains a persistent challenge, with conventional blanket spraying causing unnecessary chemical use and existing selective systems relying on costly non-imaging sensors with limited coverage. This paper therefore presents a low-cost embedded dual-band (660/850 nm) vision system for real-time weed detection and spraying, designed for deployment on municipal maintenance vehicles. The system is evaluated using three field datasets and through an exhaustive grid search, it was identified that with a lightweight local-adaptive thresholding pipeline using Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) the system could achieve an averaged F1-score of 0.78 while operating at 20 fps on Raspberry Pi hardware. Crucially, this detection performance reduces herbicide use by 64.9%. The method also maintains a low missed-weed rate of 4.35%. These results demonstrate that significant chemical savings and reliable activation behaviour can be achieved using an interpretable, computationally lightweight vision approach, enabling scalable precision spraying for municipal roadside vegetation management.
According to the Art. 53.1 of Madrid Code , three replacement names, viz. Artemisia timoshinae , A. inderensis and A. razmyslovae , are proposed here to replace the following illegitimate later homonyms published by Timoshina in 1973: A. minuta (non Rydberg, in 1916), A. elegans (non Salisbury, in 1796), and A. tenuis (non Rydberg, in 1900).
Abstract Gentiana kurroo Royle (Gentianaceae), a highly medicinal, critically endangered and endemic species of the Western Himalayas with restricted distribution in India and Pakistan. The perspective focuses on the ex-situ mass multiplication and in-situ conservation of the species through reintroduction under the species recovery initiative. The integration of effective conservation strategies viz macro and micro and intervention of modern technological tools for in-situ restoration of species were invoked. The macro propagation was carried out through seed germination and vertically segregating the profusely branched tuft of plants into small tufts along with the rhizome. The species was micro propagated through axillary bud explants in MS medium fortified with 4.4 µM BAP and 0.53 µM NAA was found to be the optimum for shoot induction having 98.23% of shoot formation with 11.32 mean shoot number per culture and shoot length of 4.6 cm. Shoots rooted in half strength MS medium supplemented with IBA (4.9 µM) and 0.3% activated charcoal. Profuse rooting with average 24.58 roots per shoot was reported after 3-weeks of incubation. The plants were acclimatized in the glass house and were finally transferred to the open environment with 83% survival percentage. Under the species reintroduction and recovery programs, the propagated saplings were introduced into three different wild habitats located in Chakrata and Mussoorriee forest divisions of Uttarakhand and 44% survival was reported after six months of field transfer. The research demonstrates the successful coherence of ex-situ propagation methods with in-situ conservation through reintroduction initiatives. The efforts might be helpful in in-situ preservation of the germplasm and simultaneously to cater the escalating medicinal requirements of Gentiana kurroo.
Two very little known Cheilolejeunea species in India, viz., Cheilolejeunea eximia (Jovet-Ast & Tixier) R.L.Zhu & M.L.So and Cheilolejeunea osumiensis (S.Hatt.) Mizut. are reported here for the first time from Meghalaya. Of which, the former was earlier known in India from Arunachal Pradesh only, while the latter from Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim. Description of both the species with notes on habitat, distribution and SEM details are provided in present communication.
Bentham in the year 1881 described a monospecific climbing bamboo genus Melocalamus. After hundred years later in 1983 the second species M. elevatissimus Hsueh & Yi was described from Tibet. At present its 15 species and one variety known from the world, three species from India. The genus was later merged with Dinochloa Buse. However, at present both are considered distinct. A species Dinochloa macclellandii initially described on vegetative characters which was subsequently transferred under Melocalamus and a combination Melocalamus macclellandii (Munro) Naithani was proposed. The present paper discusses the identity of M. macclellandii. Distinguishing characters for the genera have been provided, the epithet Melocalamus macclellandii (Munro) Naithani has been retained. Colour photographs, illustration and descriptions of the floral parts have now been provided for the first time.
