Japanese knotweed, Fallopia japonica var. japonica, causes significant disruption to natural and managed habitats, and provides a model for the control of invasive rhizome-forming species. The socioeconomic impacts of the management of, or failure to manage, Japanese knotweed are enormous, annually costing hundreds of millions of pounds sterling (GBP£) in the UK alone. Our study describes the most extensive field-based assessment of F. japonica control treatments undertaken, testing the largest number of physical and/or chemical control treatments (19 in total) in replicated 225 m 2 plots over 3 years. Treatments focused on phenology, resource allocation and rhizome source-sink relationships to reduce the ecological impacts of controlling F. japonica. While no treatment completely eradicated F. japonica, a multiple-stage glyphosate-based treatment approach provided greatest control. Increasing herbicide dose did not improve knotweed control, but treatments that maximised glyphosate coverage, e.g., spraying versus stem injection, and exploited phenological changes in rhizome source-sink relationships caused the greatest reduction of basal cover and stem density after 3 years. When designing management Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (
Declining plant biodiversity in agroecosystems has often been attributed to escalating use of chemical herbicides, but other changes in farming systems, including the clearing of seminatural habitat fragments, confound the influence of herbicides. The present study introduces a new approach to evaluate the impacts of herbicide pollution on plant communities at landscape or regional scales. If herbicides are in fact a key factor shaping agricultural plant diversity, one would expect to see the signal of past herbicide impacts in the current plant community composition of an intensively farmed region, with common, successful species more tolerant to widely used herbicides than rare or declining species. Data from an extensive field survey of plant diversity in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA, were compared with herbicide bioassay experiments in a greenhouse to test the hypothesis that common species possess higher herbicide tolerances than rare species. Five congeneric pairs of rare and common species were treated with 3 commonly used herbicide modes of action in bioassay experiments, and few significant differences were found in the tolerances of rare species relative to common species. These preliminary results suggest that other factors beyond herbicide exposure may be more important in shaping the distribution and abundance of plant species diversity across an agricultural landscape.
Sustainable land management encompasses a range of activity that balance land use requirements with wider conservation and ecosystem impact considerations. Perennial invasive alien plants (IAPs), such as Japanese knotweed, cause severe ecological and socio-economic impacts, and methods to control their spread also come at a cost. Synthetic herbicides are generally viewed as less sustainable and more ecologically damaging than alternative approaches. Here we used a comparative Life Cycle Assessment to evaluate the sustainability of herbicide-based management approaches and physical alternatives, using a large-scale Japanese knotweed field study as a model IAP system. Glyphosate-based methods elicited the lowest environmental impacts and economic costs during production. Geomembrane covering and integrated physiochemical methods were the costliest and imposed the greatest impacts. We discuss the costs and benefits of chemical and physical approaches for the sustainable management of invaded land and question how sustainable environmental stewardship is defined for the control of IAPs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.