Experiments show a variety of cover crop management programs can produce weed-suppressing cover crops.
Continue reading Study examines how well-timed cover crops can suppress weeds in California orchards
Botanists uncover the reason for an orchid’s delicate shape, deforestation is probably worse than you thought, and a test of killing weeds without herbicide.
Continue reading An orchid gives assistance, forests reduced persistence, and weeds’ electrical resistance
Ecologists have found that weeds are far more valuable in supporting biodiversity than we give them credit for.
Continue reading Weeds with a bad reputation have value for pollinators and biodiversity
Plants despised today still have value, and this book explores their contribution to the British ecosystem.
Continue reading Welcome to the wonderful world of … weeds(!)
Bidens pilosa L. (also known as cobbler’s pegs, farmer’s friend and burr marigold) is a noxious weed in many ecosystems worldwide. Across China, the plant can be found growing on roadsides and in fields and villages at elevations below 2500 m. It produces large numbers of heteromorphic (central and peripheral) achenes that differ in morphology, with the central being long and the peripheral short. In terms of ecophysiology, it was observed that peripheral achenes remain attached to the receptacle longer than central ones. There is however very little known about the germination strategies of these dimorphic achenes. Annual plants survive by...
Continue reading Achene heteromorphism in Bidens pilosa (Asteraceae): differences in germination and possible adaptive significance
How does the evolution of herbicide resistance relate to plant physiology? A new paper in AoB PLANTS suggests a few ways to find out.
Continue reading 3 Ways To Investigate Herbicide Resistance In Weeds
About half of all higher plant species are recognizable as evolutionarily recent polyploids, where multiple whole genomes or sets of chromosomes have come together from close ancestors. Additionally, over evolutionary time, all flowering plants have at least one polyploidy event, also known as a whole-genome duplication (WGD), in their ancestry, from before the divergence of gymnosperms and angiosperms, the ζ (zeta) event (see the legend in the paper for the many references). This Annals of Botany Special Issue on Polyploidy in Ecology and Evolution presents the evolutionary consequences of new, recent, and ancient polyploidy. Alix et al. survey experimental, genomic,...
Continue reading Polyploidy and interspecific hybridization shape adaptation, speciation and evolution
Visit an arable farm in England, particularly in its central and Southern parts, and ask the farmer what their number one problem is on their farm. They will most likely tell you it is black-grass.
Continue reading Black-grass: the farmer’s nemesis
This article focuses on the possible advent of human agriculture occurring 23,000 years BP.
Continue reading If ’10 000 BC’ is the answer, the question is…?
Throughout the western United States, native perennial grasses are being supplanted by aggressive non-native annuals.
Continue reading Initial success of native grasses is contingent on multiple interactions among exotic grass competition, temporal priority, rainfall, and site effects
One way of increasing crop productivity is to increase the amount of grain or other harvestable product that is actually harvested from the plant. To that end scarecrows were invented by human beings, although their success in that regard is inconsistent at best (is there a scientific study on the effectiveness of scarecrows just waiting to be done..?). However, another variation on the scarecrow theme aims to tackle productivity more directly, and shows quirkily that clues to above-ground productivity can come from ‘down-below’. Investigating any similarities between the endodermis in roots [‘the central, innermost layer of cortex in some land...
Continue reading Scaring the crows…
It looks like somebody has taken the Danish advice to obliterate weeds in my previous item too far in producing a list of ‘The top 10 ways to kill arabidopsis’. Now, I know that for many of us Arabidopsis is a weed (after all its common name is l’herbe mauvais – allegedly – in French), but even I acknowledge that it does have important plant biological uses. So, before the arabidophiles amongst my legion of adoring fans reach to turn the flamethrower or pan of boiling water on me, I ought to explain that the full title of that list...
Continue reading Arabidopsis must die(?)
Ever mindful that we ought to pursue environmentally friendlier methods where at all possible, I’ve been scouring the literature on your behalf. Well, a search for a ‘greener’ method of weed control may have ended with Anne Merete Rask’s recently defended University of Copenhagen (Denmark) PhD thesis entitled ‘Non-chemical weed control on hard surfaces: an investigation of long-term effects of thermal weed control methods’. Rather than use nasty chemicals, the research proposes that hot water/steam or heat should be used to ‘deal with’ those pesky plants (aka ‘weeds’) in hard-surface situations (i.e. not your typical arable setting). But you won’t...
Continue reading Extreme thermal weed control
Karrikinolide (KAR1) is a smoke-derived chemical that can trigger seeds to germinate, and shows promise as a tool for flushing out weed seeds from the soil seed bank. Long et al. demonstrate that weeds of Brassicaceae are particularly responsive to KAR1, and that these responses are complex and transient: light and temperature conditions, dormancy state and seed lot all influence sensitivity to KAR1, and a response to KAR1 can be induced. Three ‘response-types’ are proposed for assessing the effects of KAR1 on seeds: inherent, inducible and undetected. All 15 seed lots in this study fall into the first two categories, so KAR1 has a clear potential...
Continue reading Smoking out weeds with karrikinolideBotany One is a blog run by the Annals of Botany Company, a non-profit educational charity.
In addition to Botany One, the company currently publishes three journals, the Annals of Botany, AoB PLANTS, and in silico Plants.
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