Contemporary adaptive divergence of plant competitive traits in urban and rural populations and its implication for weed management

1. Competition among neighboring plants plays essential roles in growth, reproduction, population dynamics, and community assembly, but how competition drives local adaptation and the traits underlying the adaptation remain unclear. Here, we focused on populations of the aggressive weed Digitaria ciliaris from urban and rural habitats as low- and high-competition environments for light resources and examined how competitive interaction drove contemporary adaptive divergence of competitive traits.

2. To examine local adaptation to different competitive environments in D. ciliaris and the specific traits that have been selected for, we compared growth rate and competitive traits in plants from farmland and urban populations between high- and low-competition treatments. Furthermore, we conducted a field tillage experiment with drone (UAV) monitoring to examine the possibility that trait evolution in farmland habitats might influence weed management practices in crop fields.

3. Plants...