Field experiments were conducted to study weed population shifts in long-term conservation tillage systems. The objectives of this study were to determine weed community abundance, diversity and composition on conventional tillage (CT), minimum tillage (MT), no-tillage with paraplow (ZT) and no-tillage (NT) systems, and to identify species that are associated with specific tillage systems. The ...

Preventing the introduction of weeds into the farming system through sowing of clean seeds is an essential component of weed management. The weed seed contamination of cleaned grain and herbicide resistance levels of the recovered weed seeds were examined in a study conducted across 74 farms in the Western Australian grainbelt. Most farmers grew and conserved their own crop seed. The majority o...

Weeds tend to aggregate in patches within fields, and there is evidence that this is partly owing to variation in soil properties. Because the processes driving soil heterogeneity operate at various scales, the strength of the relations between soil properties and weed density would also be expected to be scale-dependent. Quantifying these effects of scale on weed patch dynamics is essential to...

Competitive crop cultivars offer a potentially cheap option to include in integrated weed management strategies (IWM). Although cultivars with high competitive potential have been identified amongst cereal crops, competitiveness has not traditionally been considered a priority for breeding or farmer cultivar choice. The challenge of managing herbicide-resistant weed populations has, however, re...

We studied the heterogeneity of soil weed seed-bank in a rice-wheat rotation system after long-term application of different organic or non-organic fertilizers, and the effects of major nutrients on the characteristics of the weed seed-bank. The soil was sampled in the Taihu area after a 31-year long-term fertilization experiment. Weed seeds were identified and counted in the surface soil of 12...

Organic farming has been identified as promoting soil quality even though tillage is used for weed suppression. Adopting zero tillage and other conservation tillage practices can enhance soil quality in cropping systems where synthetic agri-chemicals are relied on for crop nutrition and weed control. Attempts have been made to eliminate tillage completely when growing several field crops organi...

Conservation tillage combined with cover crops or mulching may enhance natural enemy activity in agroecosystems by reducing soil disturbance and increasing habitat structural complexity. In particular, weed seed predation can increase with vegetation cover and reduced tillage, indicating that mulches may improve the quality of the habitat for weed seed foraging. The purpose of this study was to...

For the past three years, the Danish project, RoboWeedSupport, has sought to bridge the gap between the potential herbicide savings using a decision support system and the required weed inspections. In order to automate the weed inspections it is desired to generate a map of the weed species present within the field, to generate the map images must be captured with samples covering the field. T...

Weeds pose a major threat to world agriculture by reducing detrimentally crop yield and quality. However, at the same time, weeds are major interacting components of the agroecosystems. Abundance and diversity of weeds vary significantly among the several communities. In order to evaluate each community’s structure and the interactions among them, several population indices are used as key tool...