World’s Largest Weed Database Allows Scientists to Examine the Past and Future of Global Agriculture

A new weed database, which could help scientists understand how traditional agricultural systems have been managed throughout history, could provide insight into how global trends such as the climate crisis could affect the resilience of our modern food systems.

The database is the culmination of 30 years of collaborative research between archaeologists and ecologists working at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford. It lists nearly 1,000 species of weeds growing in traditional agricultural regimes in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The work was published in History of vegetation and archaeobotany.

The open access resource, created and published by academics pursuing the research project through the University of Oxford Research Archives, offers researchers around the world the opportunity to compare archaeobotanical data with ‘traditional’ agricultural systems .

The database lists the functional characteristics of weeds growing in arable cereal and legume crops for all 928 weed species. The objective of the project was to be able to compare past and present agricultural systems through the weeds that grow alongside arable crops.

Plant ecologist John Hodgson, who worked at what is now the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield, 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 agricultural environments, where crops are micromanaged and anything unnecessary is removed, it can be difficult to monitor long-term changes in environments and plant species. So, studying historical populations weeds, instead of crops, the data gives researchers a unique way to see what has been lost and gained over the ages.

“Data analysis allows us to examine which types of plants have the ability to adapt or may be vulnerable to the changing conditions of their habitats. The robust data from these years of research offers the potential to understand the resilience of food systems in an era of climate change, drought and land degradation, and exploring a narrative about the problems the world faces today in terms of global food production.

The data models contained in the new package seek to understand how low-input (extensive) agriculture and high-input (intensive) arable agriculture compare, providing a free resource for academics to understand the nature of cultivation at field research sites, including how much workers were investing in agricultural practices at any given time and what this can say about the sites and their inhabitants.

Glynis Jones, emeritus professor of archeology at the University of Sheffield, said the data revealed new insights into the history of agriculture and changed our understanding of the development of agriculture globally. She said: “The aim of the project was to use relatively simple functional attributes of different plant species, which can be measured more quickly than expensive and time-consuming experiments, to give us entirely new information about historic sites.

“We tend to assume that agriculture began non-intensively and gradually became more intensive over the ages. However, we have found Neolithic and Bronze Age sites that challenge this belief, small plots of land that were cultivated intensively, using practices such as fertilizing, watering, and weeding crops like wheat or barley; places where a lot of human effort was devoted to cultivation of crops.

“We also found that Iron Age and Roman period sites that encompassed larger areas were farmed less intensively, so more crops could be grown, but they would not be grown in a way as intensive as before because they covered larger areas.While modern agriculture is characterized by encompassing both intensive and extensive agricultural practices.

“Our research has told us trends in arable farming over time and how farming practices have varied across environments.”

Those involved with the database say it provides a key research resource for academics working in ecology and archaeobotany. It is the culmination of 30 years of research by current and former academics at the University of Sheffield and now at the University of Oxford, including Professor of Environmental Archeology, Mike Charles, and professor of European archaeology, Amy Bogaard, who led the work to create the new R package “WeedEco” which is freely available to all.

Elizabeth Stroud, from the University of Oxford, who led the development of the new WeedEco R package, said: “For the first time, the new publication makes these datasets and models available to anyone interested in studying them. comparison of past and present arable crops. that anyone working in developer-funded or university-based archaeology, or on the plant science and ecology side, can engage directly with this research and conduct their own analyses.

“The models we publish in the R package have featured prominently in recent agriculture-related research projects at the University of Oxford School of Archaeology, such as FeedSax and AgricUrb. This work has shed new light on how a range of different societies over time produced their basic crops.

Amy Bogaard, of the University of Oxford and lead author of the latest study, noted: “The new R package and recently released dataset of the functional traits of nearly 1,000 weed species demonstrate the dedication of all those involved, and above all the vision and commitment of colleagues at the University of Sheffield, where the functional ecological approach and the link with archaeobotany was born. This is largely a joint celebration with colleagues from Sheffield and the Oxford School of Archaeology.