During 2004 to 2008, weed surveys were conducted in 373 wheat fields of two different cropped areas (southwest [SW] and southeast [SE]) of the southern region of Buenos Aires Province of Argentina where different weed communities were expected because of changes in cropping practices over time, including tillage, crop sequence, fertilizers, and herbicides applied. Weed communities differed between regions, with greater numbers of native species for the SW. Weed community diversity was also greater for the SW region, probably due to the more diverse land use that resulted in greater landscape heterogeneity. Rush skeletonweed, sand rocket, yellow starthistle and turnipseed occurred at higher constancy (proportion of fields in which a given species is present) in the SW region, whereas common chickweed, false bishop's weed, corn speedwell, and common lambsquarters were present more frequently in the SE region. Compared with the 1982 survey, constancy of weeds increased, but those species with high constancy in 1982 were also with high constancy in the recent surveys. Diversity (species richness) was greater in conventional than in a no-tillage system. The constancy of Italian ryegrass, sand rocket, and yellow starthistle was lower under no-till than conventional tillage. Surveys allow identification of changes in weed community related to different agricultural systems. Rotation of crops and livestock avoid the homogenization of the environment at the landscape level. Management strategies will be necessary to prevent the increase of weeds populations' size, preserving plant diversity and the properties of the agroecosystem.

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Knowledge about the mechanisms of herbicide resistance provide valuable insights into evolving weed populations in response to selection pressure and should be used as a basis for designing management strategies for herbicide-resistant weeds. The selection pressure associated with reactive management against glyphosate-resistant Lolium spp. populations would have favored the herbicide resistance to ACCase- and ALS-inhibitors. This work was aimed to determine the sensitivity of 80 Argentinean Lolium spp. populations to ALS- and ACCase-inhibitor herbicides for use in wheat or barley and to study the mechanisms of resistance involved. Sensitivity to pinoxaden and iodosulfuron-mesosulfuron were positively correlated ( r = 0.84), even though both affect different target sites. Inhibitors of cytochrome P450 monooxygenases (P450s) increased the sensitivity to pinoxaden and iodosulfuron-mesosulfuron in 94% of herbicide-resistant populations and target-site ACCase resistance mutations were detected only in two cases. Polymorphic variants were obtained with a pair primer designed on P450 sequences, cluster analysis discriminated around 80% of susceptible and P450-metabolic resistant plants sampled from a single population or different populations. Five markers corresponding to herbicide sensitivity were identified to be significantly associated with phenotypic variance in plants. Resistance to ALS- and ACCase-inhibitor herbicides were closely related, challenging the rotation of herbicides of both sites of action as a practice against resistance. In that sense, the use of pinoxaden and iodosulfuron-mesosulfuron would have provoked a selection on P450 genes that conduced a convergence of P450-metabolism based resistant Lolium spp. populations, which was detected by markers in a contribution to elucidate the molecular basis of this type of resistance.

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