scholarly journals Ten Ways That Weed Evolution Defies Human Management Efforts Amidst a Changing Climate

Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
David R. Clements ◽  
Vanessa L. Jones

The ability of weeds to evolve is key to their success, and the relationship between weeds and humans is marked by co-evolution going back to the agricultural revolution, with weeds evolving to counter human management actions. In recent years, climate change has emerged as yet another selection pressure imposed on weeds by humans, and weeds are likewise very capable of adapting to this latest stress of human origin. This review summarizes 10 ways this adaptation occurs: (1) general-purpose genotypes, (2) life history strategies, (3) ability to evolve rapidly, (4) epigenetic capacity, (5) hybridization, (6) herbicide resistance, (7) herbicide tolerance, (8) cropping systems vulnerability, (9) co-evolution of weeds with human management, and (10) the ability of weeds to ride the climate storm humans have generated. As pioneer species ecologically, these 10 ways enable weeds to adapt to the numerous impacts of climate change, including warming temperatures, elevated CO2, frequent droughts and extreme weather events. We conclude that although these 10 ways present formidable challenges for weed management, the novelty arising from weed evolution could be used creatively to prospect for genetic material to be used in crop improvement, and to develop a more holistic means of managing agroecosystems.

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (Special) ◽  
pp. 143-167
Author(s):  
Mohammad Shahid ◽  
Sushmita Munda ◽  
Rubina Khanam ◽  
Dibyendu Chatterjee ◽  
Upendra Kumar ◽  
...  

Climate change is widely recognized as one of the most pressing issues confronting humanity today. It is considered to be a direct threat to our food production system including rice. Climate change affects rice production in various ways. The variability in temperature and precipitation increases, predictability of seasonal weather patterns reduces and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and cyclones increases. In India, the effect of natural disasters on agriculture, including disasters caused by climate change has been gradually growing. It is believed that during the mid and end century India's future rice production is projected to reduced by 2.5 to 5% from the current level. As there is less scope for rice area to grow in the future, any growth in rice production will have to come only from productivity gains. Since climate change is a continuous process, the rice production system requires specific adaptation strategies to prevent rice yield losses and its variability. Therefore, it's critical to understand how climate change affects rice crop and to follow better production practises including crop establishment methods, water management, weed management, nutrient management and microbial resources utilization that make cropping systems more resilient to extreme weather events. The spread of climate resilient production technologies would benefit rice production systems' resilience.


Agronomy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1700
Author(s):  
Jinyi Chen ◽  
Erin Burns ◽  
Margaret Fleming ◽  
Eric Patterson

Climate change has greatly impacted agronomy. Climate forecasts for the coming years predict increases in global temperature, carbon dioxide concentration, and extreme weather events. These changes will continue to influence agricultural production by altering abiotic stress on plants, including crops and weeds. Kochia, one of the most common weeds in North America, is a C4 plant exceptional for its drought tolerance. Kochia has also demonstrated rapid adaption and evolution to the abiotic stress of herbicide application, particularly glyphosate. Abiotic stresses from both climate change and herbicides impact the distribution and expansion of kochia. Being aware of the features and properties of kochia, especially those resulting from herbicide resistance, will help anticipate how kochia responds or migrates under future climate change, and help create proper strategies for kochia weed management.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen M. Rosamond ◽  
Sandra Goded ◽  
Alaaeldin Soultan ◽  
Rachel H. Kaplan ◽  
Alex Glass ◽  
...  

Few empirical studies have quantified relationships between changing weather and migratory songbirds, but such studies are vital in a time of rapid climate change. Climate change has critical consequences for avian breeding ecology, geographic ranges, and migration phenology. Changing precipitation and temperature patterns affect habitat, food resources, and other aspects of birds’ life history strategies. Such changes may disproportionately affect species confined to rare or declining ecosystems, such as temperate grasslands, which are among the most altered and endangered ecosystems globally. We examined the influence of changing weather on the dickcissel (Spiza americana), a migratory songbird of conservation concern that is an obligate grassland specialist. Our study area in the North American Great Plains features high historic weather variability, where climate change is now driving higher precipitation and temperatures as well as higher frequencies of extreme weather events including flooding and droughts. Dickcissels share their breeding grounds with brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater), brood parasites that lay their eggs in the nests of other songbirds, reducing dickcissel productivity. We used 9 years of capture-recapture data collected over an 18-year period to test the hypothesis that increasing precipitation on dickcissels’ riparian breeding grounds is associated with abundance declines and increasing vulnerability to cowbird parasitism. Dickcissels declined with increasing June precipitation, whereas cowbirds, by contrast, increased. Dickcissel productivity appeared to be extremely low, with a 3:1 ratio of breeding male to female dickcissels likely undermining reproductive success. Our findings suggest that increasing precipitation predicted by climate change models in this region may drive future declines of dickcissels and other songbirds. Drivers of these declines may include habitat and food resource loss related to flooding and higher frequency precipitation events as well as increased parasitism pressure by cowbirds. Positive correlations of June-July precipitation, temperature, and time since grazing with dickcissel productivity did not mitigate dickcissels’ declining trend in this ecosystem. These findings highlight the importance of empirical research on the effects of increasing precipitation and brood parasitism vulnerability on migratory songbird conservation to inform adaptive management under climate change.


Author(s):  
Sergio A. Molina Murillo

Most scenarios indicate that people in developing countries are more vulnerable and less capable of adapting to climate change. Since our public understanding of risk toward climate change in developing countries is limited, this article presents results from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, two countries which are socio-economically distinct, but which are expected to suffer similar extreme weather events. From October of 2008 until May 2010, a total of 1,047 respondents were surveyed in cities of both countries. The main results indicate that climate change is a widely known concept but other notions such as “carbon footprint” are foreign to most respondents. Despite the general concern with its negative consequences, respondents’ foremost concern is linked to their socioeconomic situation, and how it will be impacted by climate change in such aspects as poverty and social security. The results presented here contribute to advance national and international policies aiming to support mitigation or adaptation strategies in developing countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Robert Ddamulira

This article addresses three research questions: How does climate change impact food production? What are the governance challenges associated with managing such impacts? What are the conditions for future success in managing the impacts of climate change on food production? To answer these questions, the researcher undertook a document review and analysis to address these various aspects with a major focus on East Africa. The study finds that climate change affects food production largely through its physical impacts on precipitation and increased the frequency of extreme weather events. Within a context of weak governance; climate change further challenges governance institutional structures and mechanisms. The study concludes that specific aspects of the prevailing climate change governance regime require major reforms (particularly the role of the state, corporations and civil society) while other climate governance mechanisms need to be completely overhauled (for example through establishment of a new World Environment Organization).


Author(s):  
Mark Cooper ◽  
Kai P. Voss-Fels ◽  
Carlos D. Messina ◽  
Tom Tang ◽  
Graeme L. Hammer

Abstract Key message Climate change and Genotype-by-Environment-by-Management interactions together challenge our strategies for crop improvement. Research to advance prediction methods for breeding and agronomy is opening new opportunities to tackle these challenges and overcome on-farm crop productivity yield-gaps through design of responsive crop improvement strategies. Abstract Genotype-by-Environment-by-Management (G × E × M) interactions underpin many aspects of crop productivity. An important question for crop improvement is “How can breeders and agronomists effectively explore the diverse opportunities within the high dimensionality of the complex G × E × M factorial to achieve sustainable improvements in crop productivity?” Whenever G × E × M interactions make important contributions to attainment of crop productivity, we should consider how to design crop improvement strategies that can explore the potential space of G × E × M possibilities, reveal the interesting Genotype–Management (G–M) technology opportunities for the Target Population of Environments (TPE), and enable the practical exploitation of the associated improved levels of crop productivity under on-farm conditions. Climate change adds additional layers of complexity and uncertainty to this challenge, by introducing directional changes in the environmental dimension of the G × E × M factorial. These directional changes have the potential to create further conditional changes in the contributions of the genetic and management dimensions to future crop productivity. Therefore, in the presence of G × E × M interactions and climate change, the challenge for both breeders and agronomists is to co-design new G–M technologies for a non-stationary TPE. Understanding these conditional changes in crop productivity through the relevant sciences for each dimension, Genotype, Environment, and Management, creates opportunities to predict novel G–M technology combinations suitable to achieve sustainable crop productivity and global food security targets for the likely climate change scenarios. Here we consider critical foundations required for any prediction framework that aims to move us from the current unprepared state of describing G × E × M outcomes to a future responsive state equipped to predict the crop productivity consequences of G–M technology combinations for the range of environmental conditions expected for a complex, non-stationary TPE under the influences of climate change.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 816
Author(s):  
Danijela Markovic ◽  
Jörg Freyhof ◽  
Oskar Kärcher

Thermal response curves that depict the probability of occurrence along a thermal gradient are used to derive various species’ thermal properties and abilities to cope with warming. However, different thermal responses can be expected for different portions of a species range. We focus on differences in thermal response curves (TRCs) and thermal niche requirements for four freshwater fishes (Coregonus sardinella, Pungitius pungitius, Rutilus rutilus, Salvelinus alpinus) native to Europe at (1) the global and (2) European continental scale. European ranges captured only a portion of the global thermal range with major differences in the minimum (Tmin), maximum (Tmax) and average temperature (Tav) of the respective distributions. Further investigations of the model-derived preferred temperature (Tpref), warming tolerance (WT = Tmax − Tpref), safety margin (SM = Tpref − Tav) and the future climatic impact showed substantially differing results. All considered thermal properties either were under- or overestimated at the European level. Our results highlight that, although continental analyses have an impressive spatial extent, they might deliver misleading estimates of species thermal niches and future climate change impacts, if they do not cover the full species ranges. Studies and management actions should therefore favor whole global range distribution data for analyzing species responses to environmental gradients.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 619
Author(s):  
Sadeeka Layomi Jayasinghe ◽  
Lalit Kumar

Even though climate change is having an increasing impact on tea plants, systematic reviews on the impact of climate change on the tea system are scarce. This review was undertaken to assess and synthesize the knowledge around the impacts of current and future climate on yield, quality, and climate suitability for tea; the historical roots and the most influential papers on the aforementioned topics; and the key adaptation and mitigation strategies that are practiced in tea fields. Our findings show that a large number of studies have focused on the impact of climate change on tea quality, followed by tea yield, while a smaller number of studies have concentrated on climate suitability. Three pronounced reference peaks found in Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RYPS) represent the most significant papers associated with the yield, quality, and climate suitability for tea. Tea yield increases with elevated CO2 levels, but this increment could be substantially affected by an increasing temperature. Other climatic factors are uneven rainfall, extreme weather events, and climate-driven abiotic stressors. An altered climate presents both advantages and disadvantages for tea quality due to the uncertainty of the concentrations of biochemicals in tea leaves. Climate change creates losses, gains, and shifts of climate suitability for tea habitats. Further studies are required in order to fill the knowledge gaps identified through the present review, such as an investigation of the interaction between the tea plant and multiple environmental factors that mimic real-world conditions and then studies on its impact on the tea system, as well as the design of ensemble modeling approaches to predict climate suitability for tea. Finally, we outline multifaceted and evidence-based adaptive and mitigation strategies that can be implemented in tea fields to alleviate the undesirable impacts of climate change.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 627
Author(s):  
Duong H. Nong ◽  
An T. Ngo ◽  
Hoa P. T. Nguyen ◽  
Thuy T. Nguyen ◽  
Lan T. Nguyen ◽  
...  

We analyzed the agricultural land-use changes in the coastal areas of Tien Hai district, Thai Binh province, in 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020, using Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 data. We used the object-oriented classification method with the maximum likelihood algorithm to classify six types of land uses. The series of land-use maps we produced had an overall accuracy of more than 80%. We then conducted a spatial analysis of the 5-year land-use change using ArcGIS software. In addition, we surveyed 150 farm households using a structured questionnaire regarding the impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity and land uses, as well as farmers’ adaptation and responses. The results showed that from 2005 to 2020, cropland decreased, while aquaculture land and forest land increased. We observed that the most remarkable decreases were in the area of rice (485.58 ha), the area of perennial crops (109.7 ha), and the area of non-agricultural land (747.35 ha). The area of land used for aquaculture and forest increased by 566.88 ha and 772.60 ha, respectively. We found that the manifestations of climate change, such as extreme weather events, saltwater intrusion, drought, and floods, have had a profound impact on agricultural production and land uses in the district, especially for annual crops and aquaculture. The results provide useful information for state authorities to design land-management strategies and solutions that are economic and effective in adapting to climate change.


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