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Impact of precipitation on popular weed species.

 By: Miroslava Hernandez   

The precipitation plays a very important role in different ecosystems like the arid and semiarid. Climate change models were used to predict the precipitation around the world. In this article they used two type of weed species which names are S. faberi and C. album and they conducted three greenhouse experiments, the green houses are in a controlled environment which temperatures ranged from 29.4 C to 15.5 C this was to have the temperatures of the spring and early summer. Based on the results of the experiment it was discovered that in fact precipitation did affect the weed species but not in the same way. According to the article it was shown that for the S. faberi the biomass decreased due to longer intervals of precipitation while the C. album did not have that much effect in the biomass it remained the same. The weed species germination had to do with whit the mass of the seeds in this case the C. album had the lower seed mass meaning that this is an important factor when it comes germination. These findings are a great advance in the environmental sustainability because the two seeds are common weed species used in the Midwest U.S., and we are looking at precipitation that happens often sometimes low and sometimes high, this will affect the abundance of agricultural weeds that are important. It is a great advance to understand how due to climate change there could be changes in the precipitation and see the impacts it has on non-arid environment. 

image The graph represents the biomass and germination responses of S. faber and C. album to variation in precipitation amount and interval times between the watering times in the greenhouse. (Robinson, Gross 2010)

References: 

Robinson, T.M.P. and Gross, K.L. (2010), The impact of altered precipitation variability on annual weed species. American Journal of Botany, 97: 1625-1629. https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.1000125


Comments

  1. elizabeth juarezNovember 16, 2020 at 6:27 PM

    I think this is a fascinating finding because it means that these results can be true for other plant species like wheat, which it is an important source of food for a lot of countries. Applying these information to other plants can be beneficial to our world because we can know where a plant can have an optimum growth based on how much precipitation that plant can receive.

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