Abstract
Differently tilled faba bean cultivations, in particular, require a comprehensive study of weed diversity, abundance, and seedbank due to the lack of experimental data. Therefore, in 2016–2018, field trials were conducted at Vytautas Magnus University on the basis of a long-term tillage experiment. Conventional deep and shallow plowing, deep chiseling, shallow disking, and no-tillage systems were investigated. According to the results of the investigations, the air temperature and amount of precipitation during the vegetative season had a greater influence on the total number of weeds (r = 0.538 and 0.833 p > 0.05) than the types of tillage systems investigated. However, on average, a reduction in tillage intensity did not change the weed number, especially in disked and not tilled plots. On average, the biomass of weeds varied little between the treatments (from 105.9 to 125.7 g m−2) and mainly depended on the volume of forecrop residues (rannual = −0.982 p ≤ 0.01 and rperennial = 0.890 p ≤ 0.05). Higher total weed seedbanks were found in the disked (+43.0%) and not tilled (+21.6%) soils compared to deeply plowed ones. The weed seedbank was almost similarly distributed between the treatments, irrespective of the tillage depth and method used.
Highlights
Conservation agriculture systems aim to minimize the soil tillage intensity in order to ensure that there is a permanent layer of crop residues on the topsoil to diversify crop rotation and optimize weed management [1,2]
It has been documented that the use of annual conventional deep plowing mainly ensures a higher crop yield and reduces the weed density [15,16], while conservation tillage technologies increase the abundance of annual weeds [14], and no-tillage technologies are more conducive to the spread of perennial weed species [17,18], especially under conditions of ineffective herbicide technology [19]
Weeds producing a lot of small seeds have been found to predominate in areas where no-tillage system is used [20], while the use of conservation tillage technologies leads to the domination of weeds with larger seeds of later flowering phenology [21]
Summary
Conservation agriculture systems aim to minimize the soil tillage intensity in order to ensure that there is a permanent layer of crop residues on the topsoil to diversify crop rotation and optimize weed management [1,2]. Germination conditions in the soil change as the water absorption of weed seeds increases or decreases [11]. These changes depend on the tillage system or type of crop rotation used [8,12,13,14]. It has been documented that the use of annual conventional deep plowing mainly ensures a higher crop yield and reduces the weed density [15,16], while conservation tillage technologies increase the abundance of annual weeds [14], and no-tillage technologies are more conducive to the spread of perennial weed species [17,18], especially under conditions of ineffective herbicide technology [19]. Short and early flowering weed species are typical of deep tillage systems [22]
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