| Sustainable farming systems that maintain the diversity of arable plant communities and associated invertebrates are a key objective for European agriculture. Plant structure–function analysis and modelling are potentially important tools for studying these arable communities, and for understanding the impact of crop–weed interactions on crop productivity and on diversity in arable food webs. To understand the role of plant structure in trophic interactions and community composition, we need knowledge of the ‘rules’ governing plant structure, and how variation in structure affects the way that plants compete for and acquire resources, both above- and belowground. As a first step to a structural-modelling approach, we have used a sonic digitizer to capture... |
