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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2025

Abstract

The value of genetic resources in agriculture is hard to overestimate as they are decisive for food safety, provide options for adaptation of future diet needs, and underpin a vast amount of biodiversity. To enable an effective conservation of these resources, we need knowledge about where they are located. The EU project GenRes Bridge showed that this knowledge is indeed modest at the European level. A source of genetic resources with particular potential for use in agriculture, e.g. related to the future adaptation to climate change, are crop wild relatives (CWR). Crop wild relatives are plant species categorized as wild relatives of cultivated plants and are used here as an indicator of genetic resources in the landscape. We therefore wanted to explore new ways of identifying hotspots of genetic resources, highlighting the landscape as a starting point. It is well established that landscape heterogeneity is closely related to biodiversity, although to our knowledge studies hitherto have rarely looked at the relation between landscape and genetic resources. Focusing on crop wild relatives, used here as an indicator for genetic resources in the landscape, we wanted to assess whether we could identify how landscape variation in topography and land cover has consequences for the spatial distribution of genetic resources that may be important in the future development of agriculture. Here we report the results from this pilot study where we have tested whether there is a correlation between landscape heterogeneity and agricultural genetic resources, using 5 x 5 km grid cells as spatial units. We used the presence of the crop wild relatives (CWR) which are prioritized for conservation in Norway as indicators of agricultural genetic resource diversity and extracted landscape heterogeneity descriptors from publicly available sources. The results from our study do suggest that landscape diversity could be a path worth following in searching for these resources in the landscape, and thus also important in decision-making on planning and management in these diverse landscapes.

Abstract

Background: Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum Sommier and Levier) is a perennial herbaceous plant that can grow to a height of 2-5 m. A single flowering plant can produce more than 20,000 seeds. It is one of Europe’s most widespread and problematic invasive alien species and a severe threat to native biodiversity. Glyphosate is widely used to control H. mantegazzianum. Decades of intensive herbicide spraying have led to environmental pollution, prompting a need to explore new methods to supplement or replace glyphosate. Objective: Non-chemical methods to control H. mantegazzianum were tested and compared with glyphosate application. Methods: In two infested locations in southeast Norway, we compared the efficacy of glyphosate applications with a combination of mechanical cutting of the flowering stem of H. mantegazzianum and hot water treatment (80 °C). Hot water or glyphosate was supplied by foliar application or injection into the root crown. Results: The best method to reduce cover and the number of H. mantegazzianum rosettes and seedlings was achieved with two foliar applications of glyphosate. Cutting the flowering stem and injecting hot water into the root crown was almost as efficient as glyphosate application. Cutting and foliar applications of hot water had the weakest efficacy. Despite the best control and significant growth of grasses after glyphosate treatment, relatively high percentage of bare soil remained in the plots afterwards, increasing the risk of erosion. Conclusions: Cutting and injection of hot water in the root crown may be a viable alternative to glyphosate application in areas where herbicides are undesirable.