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Invasive Ecology of Weeds in Agricultural Systems

  • Chapter
Weed Biology and Management

Abstract

No community is truly safe from plant invaders. Nor should it be. Succession is the normal process of species invading and replacing other species (Huston, 1994; Johnstone, 1986; Rejmánek, 1989), although this connection between invasion and succession is often ignored (Davis et al., 2001). The problem is that some plant invasions have high ecological and economic costs associated with them (Parker et al., 1999; Pimentel et al., 2000, 2001). Some economic costs of invasion are easily quantifiable (e.g. the cost of weed control, yield loss) whereas other are not (e.g., damage to ecosystems, loss of recreational land, aesthetics). The cost of invasive plants to crop and pasture land in the United States is calculated as well over 34 billion dollars annually (Pimentel et al., 2000), while in India, the cost stands even higher at 38 billion per year (Pimentel et al., 2001). Any ability to predict what species could invade will therefore have economic and ecological benefits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

    Barbara D. Booth

  2. Department of Environmental and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Stephen D. Murphy

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  1. Barbara D. Booth
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  1. Department of Botany, University of Delhi, India

    Inderjit

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Booth, B.D., Murphy, S.D., Swanton, C.J. (2004). Invasive Ecology of Weeds in Agricultural Systems. In: Inderjit (eds) Weed Biology and Management. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0552-3_2

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