For researchers to measure leaf area easily even in fields, we developed an image analysis software package, BioImage, to measure leaf area from binary image data of leaves acquired by a scanner or a digital camera. BioImage has the following five properties: 1. It runs on a Windows PC,. It is easily installed by a installer program, 3. It is easily operated under a GUI environment, 4. No need for a scale when the scanner is used and 5. It handles BMP and TIFF image formats only.
We made a comparison between the BioImage and a leaf area measurement device. Though the binalization error of a vein at a leaf base in BioImage decreased an accuracy, the accuracy of the measurement about 1% was obtained. It was shown that this accuracy was enough to measure the leaf area. BioImage enables us to measure leaf area on an available PC. If binary image data of leaves are saved, character values of leaf shape, such as its length and width, can be measured on the PC in the future.

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A user-friendly system for the utilization, by personal computer, of the Agricultural Statistic Database, which is in a Minicomputer of the HARIS (Hokkaido Agricultural Research Information System), has been developed. The improved system, using Excel VBA, offers greater ease of operation, as well as notably greater searching speed.
The new system allows one to search for items in the Statistical Yearbook of Hokkaido Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Agricultural Statistic Data on Cities and Towns), 1965 to 1996, with any PC that has Excel97 on Windows95. The data is stored on CD-R.

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A coefficient of parentage is computed with the assumption that original introductions used for the first crossings are not related to each other. The values might change if they were related. The effects of the degree of kinship on the value was simulated with the assumption that original introductions were full-sibs (assuming that their parents were not related, i.e.; the coefficient of parentage between original introductions was 0.5), half-sibs(0.25), or full-sibs of full-sibs(0.75). When the coefficient of parentage between two cultivars was low and they had a simple pedigree, the increase of the value was large with the increase of kinship or the number of introductions related. But when the coefficient of parentage was high or the cultivars had many generations from the introductions, the kinship had little effect on the value. It can be safely assumed that coefficients of parentage for modern cultivars are calculated with little bias even if original introductions are closely related to each other. It also shows that the findings reported by the author about the high quality of rice and barley cultivars related to the leading variety are valid.

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We have developed a farm-working journal database, with which crop-image data, local weather data and working journals kept by farm workers can be collectively controlled on the WWW.
All the data as well as the video camera and the weather robot, which transmit data into the database, are under control of one personal computer functioning as a WWW server with Windows95.
The Web Browsing enables the users to interface with the database since the input system for working-journal data and the data-retrieval tools were developed as CGI-scripts.
The database can be shared through a computer network by agricultural product organizations, local farmers and consumers; accordingly, anticipated can be the improvement of farming techniques including farm-product analysis, farm-work sharing and farm-working instructions.
In Addition, on the World Wide Web, we are planning to relate this database system to others, namely, Crop-database and Market-database. As a result, this can be developed into a collective-support system for agricultural production in decision-making.

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