A Review of Weed Interference Models

Weeds represent a continuous problem in agricultural production due to their dynamic and resilient nature. Mathematical models offer a significant tool for understanding and predicting the crop yield losses incurred due to weed-crop interference. Weed-crop competition models help to inform weed management decisions, both on a short-term basis to tackle the present weed population and in the long term to plan sustainable weed management strategies. Most competition studies are based on empirical models. Empirical functions are the most commonly used models, which provide information for weed threshold values. The limitations of such models are that they are based on statistical functions and usually do not consider biological insights for crop-weed interference. Crop-weed competition is a complex phenomenon, and to understand this, a detailed mechanistic model offers better insights than an empirical model. Mechanistic or explanatory models take into account all underlying processes or mechanisms and their dependence on each other with respect to time and external drivers. Competition models can be integrated within the framework of a decision support system (DSS). In this review, we present empirical and mechanistic models that are currently in use for studying crop-weed interference.