Over the last 30 years, many studies have surveyed weed vegetation on arable land. The ‘Arable Weeds and Management in Europe’ (AWME) database is a collection of 36 of these surveys and the associated management data. Here, we review the challenges associated with combining disparate datasets and explore some of the opportunities for future research that present themselves thanks to the AWME database. We present three case studies repeating previously published national scale analyses with data from a larger spatial extent. The case studies, originally done in France, Germany and the UK, explore various aspects of weed ecology (community composition, management and environmental effects and within-field distributions) and use a range of statistical techniques (canonical correspondence analysis, redundancy analysis and generalised linear mixed models) to demonstrate the utility and versatility of the AWME database. We demonstrate that (i) the standardisation of abundance data to a common measure, before the analysis of the combined dataset, has little impact on the outcome of the analyses, (ii) the increased extent of environmental or management gradients allows for greater confidence in conclusions and (iii) the main conclusions of analyses done at different spatial scales remain consistent. These case studies demonstrate the utility of a Europe-wide weed survey database, for clarifying or extending results obtained from studies at smaller scales. This Europe-wide data collection offers many more opportunities for analysis that could not be addressed in smaller datasets; including questions about the effects of climate change, macro-ecological and biogeographical issues related to weed diversity as well as the dominance or rarity of specific weeds in Europe.

Questions: Two scientific disciplines, vegetation science and weed science, study arable weed vegetation, which has seen a strong diversity decrease in Europe over the last decades. We compared two collections of plot-based vegetation records originating from these two disciplines. The aim was to check the suitability of the collections for joint analysis and for addressing research questions from the opposing domains. We asked: are these collections complementary? If so, how can they be used for joint analysis?. Location: Europe. Methods: We compared 13 311 phytosociological relevés and 13 328 records from weed science, concerning both data collection properties and the recorded species richness. To deal with bias in the data, we also analysed different subsets (i.e., crops, geographical regions, organic vs conventional fields, center vs edge plots). Results: Records from vegetation science have an average species number of 19.0 ± 10.4. Metadata on survey methodology or agronomic practices are rare in this collection. Records from weed science have an average species number of 8.5 ± 6.4. They are accompanied by extensive methodological information. Vegetation science records and the weed science records taken at field edges or from organic fields have similar species numbers. The collections cover different parts of Europe but the results are consistent in six geographical subsets and the overall data set. The difference in species numbers may be caused by differences in methodology between the disciplines, i.e., plot positioning within fields, plot sizes, or survey timing. Conclusion: This comparison of arable weed data that were originally sampled with a different purpose represents a new effort in connecting research between vegetation scientists and weed scientists. Both collections show different aspects of weed vegetation, which means the joint use of the data is valuable as it can contribute to a more complete picture of weed species diversity in European arable landscapes.

“Arable Weeds and Management in Europe” is a collection of weed vegetation records from arable fields in Europe, initiated within the Working Group Weeds and Biodiversity of the European Weed Research Society (EWRS). Vegetation-plot data from this scientific community was not previously contributed to databases. We aim to prove the usefulness of collection for large scale studies through some first analyses. We hope to assure other weed scientists who have signalled willingness to share data, and plan to construct a full data base, making the data available for easy sharing. Presently, the collection has over 60,000 records, taken between 1996 and 2015. Many more studies for potential inclusion exist. Data originate mostly from studies exploring the effect of agricultural management on weed vegetation. The database is accompanied with extensive meta-data on crop and weed management on the surveyed fields. The criteria for inclusion were a minimum amount of information on the cultivated crop, and a georeference. Most fields were surveyed repeatedly, i.e. transects, multiple random plots, or repeated visits. All surveys aimed to record the complete vegetation on the plots. Sometimes, taxa were identified only to genus level, due to survey dates very early in the vegetation period. Plant taxonomy is standardized to the Euro+Med PlantBase.