Emerging Agricultural Weeds under climate and land-use changes in Central Europe: identifying high-risk species, modelling their distributions, assessing impacts and management need.
The AgriWeedClim project (November 2021 to November 2024), led by researchers at the University of Vienna in collaboration with Masaryk University (Brno) and the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), studied how climate and land-use changes affect agricultural weed communities in Central Europe. A key outcome of the project was the creation of the AgriWeedClim database, which brings together more than 32,000 historical and modern vegetation records from arable fields. This dataset provides a unique basis for investigating long-term changes in species composition, ecological shifts in cropping systems, and the emergence of non-crop alien plant species.
Although I was not directly part of the project consortium, I worked closely with the database curator, Dr. Michael Glaser, to analyze the spread of non-native plants across ten Central European countries between 1930 and 2019. From 21,747 vegetation plots, we assessed changes in the occurrence and relative abundance of archaeophytes and neophytes over time. Our results showed a strong increase in neophytes, driven by a few dominant species, while archaeophytes followed a more stable trajectory. Together with colleagues who contributed data and my supervisors, Professors Stefan Dullinger and Franz Essl, I developed this work into my first scientific publication, which later became the opening chapter of my PhD thesis. I also presented these findings at the project’s Abschlussmeeting, where we discussed future research possibilities with the database.
This collaboration with AgriWeedClim directly fed into my PhD project ASAAS (Alien Species Accumulation Across Scales). The first paper of my thesis built on these analyses to examine how alien species accumulate regionally compared to their representation in local communities. The database provided an essential test case for studying whether increases in alien species at broad scales are mirrored at the level of individual plots, or whether ecological and environmental filters slow their spread.
In addition, I co-supervised master’s student Georg Martin Hörmann together with Dr. Glaser, who used the AgriWeedClim database to assess the risks and impacts of emerging weeds in agricultural landscapes. His work identified high-risk species based on ecological traits and modeled their potential spread under different climate scenarios. These results highlighted which species are most likely to expand in the coming decades and where their impacts could be most pronounced.