The Ecology of Crop-Weed Interactions

Abstract

Summary Understanding the ecology of crop-weed interactions includes a wide array of population and community ecology theory. The first thorough application of theory in Weed Ecology was predicting weed impacts on crops. The generality of crop yield response to weeds has been well supported with a wealth of empirical studies, however, inclusion of these models into weed management decision support systems (DSS) has been less fruitful. Parameterization of the empirical models has indicated extreme variability over space and time, even in experimental plots. Thus, further development and implementation of ecologically based weed management must depend on understanding sources of crop response variation, understanding complexity of interactions among the many sources of variation, and the realization that forecasting crop response will always have some level of uncertainty. Ecological theory may help us understand how to best construct conceptual and predictive models of crop-weed communities to accomplish our applied goals.