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World's Largest Database of Weeds Lets Scientists Peer Into the Past, and Future, of Global Agriculture

World's Largest Database of Weeds Lets Scientists Peer Into the Past, and Future, of Global Agriculture


The database is the culmination of 30 years of collaborative research from archaeologists and ecologists working at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. It catalogues nearly 1000 species of weeds growing in traditional agricultural regimes in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.

The database catalogues the functional traits of weeds growing amongst arable cereal and pulse crops for all 928 weed species. The aim of the project was to be able to compare past and present farming systems through the weeds that grow alongside arable crops.

Plant ecologist, John Hodgson, who worked at what is now the University of Sheffield’s School of Biosciences, was involved in the research from the 1990s. He said: “The data gives archaeologists and plant ecologists a way to understand the past and predict the future together.

“In modern day agricultural environments, where crops are micromanaged and everything that is not wanted is removed, it can be difficult to monitor long term changes to environments and plant species. So by investigating historical weed populations, instead of the crops, the data offers researchers a unique way to see what has been lost and gained over the ages.

“Analysis of the data allows us to look at what kind of plants have the ability to adapt to, or may be vulnerable to changing conditions in their habitats. The robust data from this years-long research offers the potential for understanding the resilience of food systems in a time of climate change, drought and degradation of land, and the exploration of a narrative for issues the world is facing today in terms of global food production.”

The data models contained in the new package look to understand how low input (extensive) farming and high input (intensive) arable agriculture compare, which offers a free resource for academics to understand the nature of crop cultivation at field research sites, including how much labour people were investing in agricultural practices at a given time and what this may say about the sites and their inhabitants.

Click here to read more eurekalert.org

Photo Credit: university-of-new-york

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