Two sides of one medal: Arable weed vegetation of Europe in phytosociological data compared to agronomical weed surveys

Abstract

Questions Two scientific disciplines, vegetation science and weed science, study arable weed vegetation, which has seen a strong diversity decrease in Europe over the last decades. We compared two collections of plot‐based vegetation records originating from these two disciplines. The aim was to check the suitability of the collections for joint analysis and for addressing research questions from the opposing domains. We asked: are these collections complementary? If so, how can they be used for joint analysis? Location Europe. Methods We compared 13 311 phytosociological relevés and 13 328 records from weed science, concerning both data collection properties and the recorded species richness. To deal with bias in the data, we also analysed different subsets (i.e., crops, geographical regions, organic vs conventional fields, center vs edge plots). Results Records from vegetation science have an average species number of 19.0 ± 10.4. Metadata on survey methodology or agronomic practices are rare in this collection. Records from weed science have an average species number of 8.5 ± 6.4. They are accompanied by extensive methodological information. Vegetation science records and the weed science records taken at field edges or from organic fields have similar species numbers. The collections cover different parts of Europe but the results are consistent in six geographical subsets and the overall data set. The difference in species numbers may be caused by differences in methodology between the disciplines, i.e., plot positioning within fields, plot sizes, or survey timing. Conclusion This comparison of arable weed data that were originally sampled with a different purpose represents a new effort in connecting research between vegetation scientists and weed scientists. Both collections show different aspects of weed vegetation, which means the joint use of the data is valuable as it can contribute to a more complete picture of weed species diversity in European arable landscapes.

The utility of the ‘Arable Weeds and Management in Europe’ database: Challenges and opportunities of combining weed survey data at a European scale

“…Many surveys are designed for a particular purpose and so the collected data, and associated metadata, are specific to the particular research question. As such, the resulting local databases can contain different methodologies and data types (Bürger et al, 2022 ). Despite such discrepancies, there is potential for added benefits when surveys are analysed in combination, as demonstrated by the success of several plot‐vegetation databases (e.g., European Vegetation Archive [EVA] [Chytrý et al, 2016 ], European Weed Vegetation Database [Küzmič et al, 2020 ]).…”

Precision Chemical Weed Management Strategies: A Review and a Design of a New CNN-Based Modular Spot Sprayer

“…Besides the herbicide reduction, the environmental risks associated with herbicide use were reduced, including herbicide leaching into the groundwater, herbicide resistance development in weeds, and herbicide residues in the food chain and drift [7]. By reducing the herbicide load into the environment, the diversity of weed species and insects can also be increased and rare weed species can be protected [87,88].…”

AgriWeedClim database: A repository of vegetation plot data from Central European arable habitats over 100 years

“…We note that this analysis of temporal changes of species numbers per vegetation plot is based on raw data not corrected for sampling effort per decade or for vegetation plot size as well as differences in data sources (i.e. studies focusing on biodiversity versus studies focusing on agriculture and weed management) that may influence the number of species per plot (Bürger et al, 2022).…”