Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Attached. Note summary of "action items" provided at end of document.

The overarching objective of the NC1026 project and its multi-state group of collaborators is to determine the importance of representing demographic realism within weed decision support systems (DSS) and to facilitate incorporating the information that can best help to improve weed management decision-making. Over the course of the last year, the most widely used DSS, WeedSoft, was overhauled in order to determine the importance weed escapes on the decisions recommended by the software. Our examination revealed that some fundamental processes, such as a lack of synchrony in weed emergence, were not and could not be represented within the current framework. We therefore initiated a plan to create a simplified version of WeedSoft and compare its decision-making performance with a set of more demographically realistic alternatives in order to assess the value of changing how it represents weed-crop competition and the response of weed population to various management interventions. The group also accomplished a great deal experimentally. Six collaborators conducted the demography protocol (Object 1a) and several modifications were agreed upon moving into the next year. The demography information provided by the regional experiment will provide a means for assessing the importance of modifying the structure of a DSS like WeedSoft so as to incorporate a more realistic representation of the impact of weeds and how they respond to management. Initial reports from those conducting the soil training experiments (Objective 1b) were also very interesting and could strongly influence our assessment of the value of adding additional biological realism into weed decision support tools. If the weed decision support tools are to evolve beyond herbicide selection for different crop-weed scenarios, it will be through efforts like this regional project.

Davis, A. S. , J. Cardina, F. Forcella, G. A. Johnson, G. Kegode, J. L. Lindquist, E. C. Luschei, K. A. Renner, C. L. Sprague, and M. M. Williams II. 2005. Environmental factors affecting seed persistence of 13 annual weeds. Weed Science 53: 860-868.