Search

Background: Maize (Zea mays) grain sprouts (MGS) can be a potential source of green fodder for ruminants, especially when there is scarcity of land and water. Nutritional value of MGS grown with hydroponic technique was assessed for nutrient utilization, blood biochemical profile, immunity and growth performance in lambs. Methods: The MGS were produced in a polyhouse and harvested on 10th day and subjected to rumen in vitro incubation for gas production (RIVIGP) test to predict metabolisable energy (ME) value. The feeding cum growth trial was conducted for 120 days. Eighteen healthy male lambs of 3-4 months age and comparable body weight were randomly allotted in a complete randomized design to three dietary groups of six in each. The control (T1) group lambs were fed conventional green fodder (CGF), finger millet straw (FMS) and compounded feed mixture (CFM) at 50:10:40 ratio on DM basis, In treatment group two (T2), proportion of CGF and CFM was reduced by 50% and substituted with 45% MGS on DM basis (CGF, FMS, CFM and MGS on total DM basis was in 25:10:20:45 ratio, respectively). In treatment group three (T3), CGF was completely replaced with MGS (80%) and CFM was reduced to 25% of control (CGF, FMS, CFM and MGS on total DM basis was in 0:10:10:80 ratio, respectively). Result: Results indicated that MGS has ME (MJ/kg DM) of 9.70. The average DM intake (g/d/lamb) in T1, T2 and T3 groups was 764, 581 and 398, respectively. The average daily gain (ADG, g) in T1, T2 and T3 groups was 77.3, 48.5 and 20.9, respectively. There was a significant (P less than 0.05) decrease in DMI and ADG with reduced feed efficiency in lambs fed MGS. However, the per cent digestibility of nutrients, blood biochemical profile, immunity and serum minerals in lambs did not differ among the groups. It is concluded that replacement of compounded feed mixture or conventional green fodder with MGS will limit the dry matter intake, net nutrient availability and negatively affect the growth performance in lambs.

An experiment was conducted to study the nutritional value of jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) residue silage in terms of chemical composition, and nutrient utilization in lambs fed a straw-based diet. Eighteen Mandya lambs of about 3 to 6 months of age with average BW of 9.55±0.31 kg were divided into three groups of six each in a completely randomized design. The first group of lambs were fed on finger millet straw as the sole source of roughage and compounded feed mixture and served as a control (CON), while the second (JRS-25) and third (JRS-50) group lambs were fed with jackfruit residue silage (JRS) to replace 25 and 50%, respectively, of the finger millet straw. The feeding trial was continued for 82 d and a digestion trial of 6 d was carried out at 8th week of the experiment. The chemical analyses revealed that JRS had higher CP (8.77 vs. 3.35%) and EE (1.91 vs. 0.79%) and lower total ash (6.46 vs. 8.51%), NDF (34.08 vs. 71.84%), ADF (27.88 vs. 46.46%) and ADL (1.06 vs. 3.83%) contents as compared to the finger millet straw. There was no significant (P>0.05) difference in total DM intake among the dietary groups. The ADG was found significantly (P 0.05) among the three groups. The mean apparent digestibility of nutrients also did not vary among the groups. From the study, it can be deduced that jackfruit residue silage has the potential to be included in the diet of growing lambs by replacing up to 50% of finger millet straw.

Forests being an indispensable resource play an important role in maintaining the earth's ecological balance. The major contributors of deforestation are logging off of trees (legal or illegal), tree theft, forest fire etc. Large scale deforestation has negative impact on the atmosphere resulting in global warming, flash floods, landslides, drought etc. Due to these adverse effects, forest management department all over the countries have taken steps for monitoring the forest to prevent deforestation. Several surveillance techniques have been employed for monitoring and prevention; they are broadly classified as Ground-based sensing techniques and Remote sensing techniques. Surveillance plays an important role in forest management. It had been used in the past and is still being used for monitoring and information collection. Ground-based techniques generally include surveillance by on-site security staff and mobile patrols monitoring the property by water, land and air (Magrath et al., 2007). Some complementary systems such as Fixed Earth System are also used with observation towers located at strategic points with specialized personnel for observing and detecting the presence of fire. All these systems are expensive and time consuming, requiring a lot of resources. Nowadays, remote sensing technologies are also used like, aerial photographs, automatic video surveillance, wireless surveillance systems and satellite imagery. Satellite imagery is very costly for use in monitoring any illegal activity like trespassers, tree theft and deforestation (if they are able to detect at all). On the other hand, with the technological advancements in wireless communication, various low power, and low cost, small-sized sensors nodes are available which can be readily deployed to monitor environment over vast areas. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technology is being used widely for monitoring and controlling applications. Currently three main wireless standards are used namely: WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. Amongst them, ZigBee is the most promising standard owing to its low power consumption and simple networking configuration. Wireless sensor network based surveillance systems for remote deployment and control are more cost effective and are easy to deploy at location of interest. They can even reach those areas where satellite signals are not available. Moreover, they can be configured to monitor large areas and they have secure mode of data transmission. Environmentally, WSNs finds immense application in land management, agriculture management, lake water quality management, forest fire detection, tree theft prevention and also in the prevention of deforestation. In addition, WSN system has also been used for strain monitoring in railway bridges. (Bischoff et al., 2009), developed an event based strain

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the paradigm of inter connecting heterogeneous devices which are distributed globally and will be a part of the future Internet. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are one of the integral classes of networks in the IoT. One of the major challenges to achieve IoT is to integrate and manage large heterogeneous networks. Autonomic network management system is the need of the hour to prop up successful implementation of IoT and it should be in sync with the existing Internet architecture and protocols for smooth and wider applications in IoT. Here we reviewed and proposed a novel heterogeneous and self optimizing sensor network management system which envisages energy saver, life time enhancer and flexible auto configuration of WSNs