Ambrosia artemisiifolia is the most noxious invasive species of weed in Hungary. The aim of this study was to quantify the environmental and land-use factors that explain the variance in its abundance in arable fields. A survey of 243 arable fields was carried out across Hungary, and 19 environmental and 12 land-use factors were measured. These were used as explanatory variables in classification and regression tree models. The abundance of A. artemisiifolia was significantly higher at the edges than at the centres of fields. The most important land-use variables explaining the variance in abundance of A. artemisiifolia were crop type and crop cover, with the highest abundance recorded in sunflower fields and fields with low crop cover. The following explanatory environmental variables were associated with significantly higher A. artemisiifolia abundance: sandy or acidic soils, mean April precipitation > 39 mm, mean annual precipitation > 592 mm and mean May temperature < 15.5 °C. Ambrosia artemisiifolia was significantly less abundant in fields with soils containing high concentrations of Na, K and Mn. Both farmers and nature conservationists should be made aware of the conditions and practices that favour ragweed so that they can develop effective and selective ragweed control practices, particularly in arable habitats with a high diversity of weeds.
Vochysia divergens Pohl is considered to be a flood-adapted, light-demanding pioneer species that has been invading grasslands of the Brazilian Pantanal. In these areas, a successful invasion requires an ability to tolerate physiologically wide fluctuations in surface hydrology and shading induced by a dense cover of grasses and other vegetation. We evaluated how flooding and shading affected the photosynthetic performance of V. divergens saplings by measuring light-saturated gas exchange (net photosynthetic rate, PN; stomatal conductance, gs), and intercellular CO2 (PN/Ci) and photosynthetic photon flux density
(PN/PPFD) response curves over a 61-d field experiment. Shading and flooding reduced significantly light-saturated PN and gs and affected multiple aspects of the leaf gas exchange response of V. divergens to variations in PPFD and CO2. Flooding influenced the physiology of this species more than shading. Given the success of V. divergens at invading and expanding in seasonally flooded areas of the Pantanal, the results were surprising and highlighted the physiological ability of this species to tolerate suboptimal conditions. However, the consistently higher light-saturated PN and gs under nonflooded conditions suggested that the invasive success of V. divergens might not be related to its physiological potential during flooding, but to situations, when flooding recedes during the dry season and soil water availability is adequate. and A. C. Dalmolin ... [et al.].