| Crops and weeds co-evolve in particular plant communities that are assembled in agro-ecosystems. In this essay we discuss the mechanisms determining this co-evolution and the processes regulating the success of individual populations within crop-weed communities as a starting point to evaluate and interpret which are the risks of promoting invasive species due to technological changes introduced into cropping activities. We follow a framework considering co-evolutionary mechanisms (namely, genetic variation, breeding system and selective forces) and demographical processes (namely, establishment, competition, dispersion) as a way to predict, not only how weeds will evolve in agricultural land, and thus how new problems for production of food and fibre... |
