IWMPRAISE - An EU horizon 2020 project providing integrated weed management solutions to European farmers

IWMPRAISE is the first EU Framework Research project focusing solely on weed management. Thirty-eight partners in eight European countries are working together on developing integrated weed management strategies for agricultural and horticultural crops. Per Kudsk, the coordinator of IWMPRAISE, and the work package leaders present the project, the on-going studies and some of the early outputs. Weeds are ubiquitous and cause substantial yield losses across all arable and horticultural systems. Currently, the reliance on herbicides is very high in conventional farming systems and in many European countries herbicides are the single most used group of pesticides (https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=aei_fm_salpest09&lang=en). There are several reasons for the high herbicide use, such as lack of threshold-based spraying decisions and lack of any single sufficiently effective, readily applicable, cost-effective non-chemical method. Nonetheless, two factors are driving an immediate need to change weed control practices in conventional farming: the rapidly increasing problem of herbicide resistance, exacerbated by the fact that no new herbicide sites of action have been marketed since the early 1980s, and the expectation that many of the currently used herbicides will be withdrawn from the EU market as they do not meet the human and environmental toxicity criteria set out in EU Regulation 1109/2009. In addition to these two immediate concerns, it has also been shown that herbicides have partly been responsible for recent declines in farmland biodiversity and hence a negative impact on the associated ecosystem services. The over-reliance on chemical control of weeds has highlighted the need for Integrated Weed Management (IWM) strategies that combine non-chemical management options that reduce either weed density or competition with the crop.