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This document is an editorial from the journal Agronomy titled "The Future of Weed Science: Novel Approaches to Weed Management." The editorial discusses the need for new and innovative approaches to weed management in light of the European Union's focus on reducing chemical control. The document highlights various research papers that cover topics such as agroecological weed management, precision agriculture, remote sensing, and the potential role of allelopathy and nature-based compounds. The authors emphasize the importance of combining these methods, evaluating them under different conditions, and optimizing strategies for both agronomic performance and ecosystem services. [Extracted from the article]

World agriculture is facing a great challenge since it is necessary to find a sustainable way to increase food production. Current trends in advancing the agriculture sector are based on leveraging remote sensing technology and the use of biostimulants. However, the efficient implementation of both of these on a commercial scale for the purposes of productivity improvement remains a challenge. Thus, by proposing a crop monitoring strategy based on remote sensing data, this paper aims to verify and anticipate the impact of applying a Glycinebetaine biostimulant (GB) on the final yield. The study was carried out in a rice-producing area in Eastern Spain (Valencia) in 2021. GB was applied by drone 33 days after sowing (tillering phase). Phenology was monitored and crop production parameters were determined. Regarding satellite data, Sentinel-2 cloud-free images were obtained from sowing to harvest, using the bands at 10 m. Planet data were used to evaluate the results from Sentinel-2. The results show that GB applied 33 days after sowing improves both crop productive parameters and commercial yield (13.06% increase). The design of the proposed monitoring strategy was based on the dynamics and correlations between the visible (green and red) and NIR bands. The analysis showed differences when comparing the GB and control areas, and permitted the determination of the moment in which the effect of GB on yield (tillering and maturity) may be greater. In addition, an index was constructed to verify the crop monitoring strategy, its mathematical expression being: NCMI = (NIR − (red + green))/(NIR + red + green). Compared with the other VIs (NDVI, GNDVI and EVI2), the NCMI presents a greater sensitivity to changes in the green, red and NIR bands, a lower saturation phenomenon than NDVI and a better monitoring of rice phenology and management than GNDVI and EVI2. These results were evaluated with Planet images, obtaining similar results. In conclusion, in this study, we confirm the improvement in rice crop productivity by improving sustainable plant nutrition with the use of biostimulants and by increasing the components that define crop yield (productive tillers, spikelets and grains). Additionally, crop monitoring using remote sensing technology permits the anticipation and understanding of the productive behavior and the evolution of the phenological stages of the crop, in accordance with crop management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grain-yield prediction using remotely sensed data have been intensively studied in wheat and maize, but such information is limited in rice, barley, oats and soybeans. The present study proposes a new framework for rice-yield prediction, which eliminates the influence of the technology development, fertilizer application, and management improvement and can be used for the development and implementation of provincial rice-yield predictions. The technique requires the collection of remotely sensed data over an adequate time frame and a corresponding record of the region's crop yields. Longer normalized-difference-vegetation-index (NDVI) time series are preferable to shorter ones for the purposes of rice-yield prediction because the well-contrasted seasons in a longer time series provide the opportunity to build regression models with a wide application range. A regression analysis of the yield versus the year indicated an annual gain in the rice yield of 50 to 128 kg ha−1. Stepwise regression models for the remotely sensed rice-yield predictions have been developed for five typical rice-growing provinces in China. The prediction models for the remotely sensed rice yield indicated that the influences of the NDVIs on the rice yield were always positive. The association between the predicted and observed rice yields was highly significant without obvious outliers from 1982 to 2004. Independent validation found that the overall relative error is approximately 5.82%, and a majority of the relative errors were less than 5% in 2005 and 2006, depending on the study area. The proposed models can be used in an operational context to predict rice yields at the provincial level in China. The methodologies described in the present paper can be applied to any crop for which a sufficient time series of NDVI data and the corresponding historical yield information are available, as long as the historical yield increases significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]