Autonomous robotic weed control systems hold promise toward the automation of one of agriculture’s few remaining unmechanized and drudging tasks, hand weed control. Robotic technology may also provide a means of reducing agriculture’s current dependency on herbicides, improving its sustainability and reducing its environmental impact. This review describes the current status of the four core te...

Reproductive traits are key parameters for the evolution of invasiveness in weedy crop-wild hybrids. In Beta vulgaris, cultivated beets hybridize with their wild relatives in the seed production areas, giving rise to crop-wild hybrid weed beets. We investigated the genetic structure, the variation in first-year flowering and the variation in mating system among weed beet populations occurring w...

No-till cropping is an option for growers needing to reduce soil erosion in the Palouse annual-cropped region of the Pacific Northwest, which is well suited for wheat production. A 6-yr field study was conducted to determine optimum levels of fertilizer and herbicide inputs in a no-till continuous wheat crop production system. Three levels of nitrogen (N) and two weed management levels (WML) we...

Farmers need alternatives for weed control due to the desire to reduce chemicals used in farming. However, conventional mechanical cultivation cannot selectively remove weeds located in the seedline between crop plants and there are no selective herbicides for some crop/weed situations. Since hand labor is costly, an automated weed control system could be feasible. A robotic weed control system...

Field studieswere conducted in 2003 and 2004 to determine the effects of grassyweeds, postemergence grass control, transgenic rootworm-resistant corn, Zea mays L., expressing the Cry3Bb1endotoxin andglyphosate herbicide tolerance (Bt corn), and the interactions of these factors on western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte, damage and adult emergence. Three insect management ...

In this work we demonstrate a rapidly deployable weed classification system that uses visual data to enable autonomous precision weeding without making prior assumptions about which weed species are present in a given field. Previous work in this area relies on having prior knowledge of the weed species present in the field. This assumption cannot always hold true for every field, and thus limi...

A study was carried out to determine the composition and predominance of weed species in wheat field in Khokana of Kathmandu valley as a representative sample of mountain ecosystem in Nepal. A total of 44 weed species representing 18 families were recorded. The most abundant species were Chenopodium album, Polygonum plebeium and Spergula arvensis. With the improved temperature after February, t...

The ability to manage weed infestations in a spatially precise manner will rely on the availability of efficient methods of mapping weed distributions. We have conducted a study designed to compare four different ground based methods for collecting georeferenced information on sterile wild oat infestation in a winter barley crop. Sampling was done at harvest time (when wild oat panicles are mos...

Unconventional ways of growing plants, when we return to non-chemical methods of controlling weeds, require new weed control methods. One of the few physical methods, which found wider application in practice, is a flame weeder with heat burners based on the use of gas (LPG). However, the process of practical use of this flame weeder has a number of factors that positively or negatively affect ...

Changing climate is expected to alter precipitation patterns in the Arctic, with consequences for subsurface temperature and moisture conditions, community structure, and nutrient mobilization through microbial belowground processes. Here, we address the effect of increased snow depth on the variation in species richness and community structure of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) and saprotrophic fungi. S...