Undersowing rare arable plants in cereals as a new instrument in weed management - restoration ecology meets weed science

Weed control is necessary in agriculture, but it is also known to be one of the main drivers of plant biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes. Since biodiversity is essential for ecosystem service provision, new approaches in weed management are needed to simultaneously increase biodiversity and prevent yield losses due to weed competition. In this study, we investigated the establishment of undersowing cereals with rare arable plant (RAP) species, their weed suppression ability, and influence on spring barley yield. We collected data at the species level for RAP and weed coverage and their fluctuations during a three-year on-farm trial (Hirrlingen), supplemented by a second one-year on-farm trial (Bettenreute) to confirm the results, both located in Southwestern Germany. The experiments were set up as randomised complete block designs with four treatments consisting of a control (1), a topsoil translocation (4), and two treatments with seeded RAP species mixtures at two levels (lo..., , # Data from: Undersowing rare arable plants in cereals as a new instrument in weed management - restoration ecology meets weed science

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.9s4mw6mw6](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9s4mw6mw6)

## Description of the data and file structure

We set up two trials as randomised complete block designs with four repetitions. The treatment plot size at Hirrlingen was 2 m x 5 m and, at Bettenreute, 1.35 m x 8 m, all with the longer side of the plots in sowing direction of the crop. To evaluate the growth behaviour of RAP as well as common weeds over the years, we used nondestructive vegetation surveys. In each growing season, we conducted a vegetation survey before crop harvest when RAP were in BBCH growth stages 55 – 75. For the vegetation surveys, we assessed whole treatment plots using the extended Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale (Wilmanns, 1998). Each species of segetal plants in each replicate of every treatment was assigned a Braun-Blanquet score. Later, we tr...,