To improve the adaptation to climate change of weeds from cereal agro-ecosystems, INIA has completed a project where it has facilitated a weed classification study for local and regional use in the agricultural sector.

The Institute of Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA) has completed the project “The role of resilience in the composition of weed communities of cereal agro-ecosystems. Adaptive responses of weed flora to climate change” was held, which has had the support of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry for Ecological Transition through its 2017 call for grants. The objective has been to identify the strategies for adaptation to climate change developed by extensive livestock farmers in Spain in a framework of global change.

Climate change entails a process of modification, adaptation and self-organization of relationships in ecosystems that need to readjust their balances to be sustainable in the long term. Biodiversity is an essential variable in agricultural systems, as well as the way in which the interactions between the integral parts of the agro-ecosystem are organized and balanced. However, there is a great lack of information on the succession of equilibria and imbalances that occur in agro-ecosystems.

The general objective of this project has been to study in a model area, with different climatic environments based on differences in altitude, the influence of temperature variation on weed communities that are part of the biodiversity of cereal agro-ecosystems, as a measure of adaptation to CC.

In the selected model area, a search was carried out in different data sources to obtain temperature data and collect information on weed species present in rainfed cereal agro-ecosystems in an altitude range of 300 to 1500 m. The results obtained from the databases were confirmed with a monitoring of the weed flora on an established central-southern route.

This study has managed to describe the distribution of weed populations in cereal agro-ecosystems, at a local and regional scale, sensitive to temperature changes, thus contributing to the detection of temperature changes that may occur in these systems. Weed species, those identified in the databases, have been classified as allies for the sustainability of cereal agro-ecosystems. Through a scheme of association trees between the weed communities and the altitude-temperature ranges of the study area, it has been possible to visualize the resilience capacity of weed species to climate change.