Abstract
We made a first descriptive study of weedy sunflowers infesting sunflower crop fields in one Spanish and three French regions. Overall, weedy sunflowers affected around 15% of sunflower fields. Infested fields were most often dispersed over the study areas without evident geographical clustering. In France, five weedy populations were surveyed more intensively. They were composed of a large diversity of morphotypes showing a combination of typical wild and domesticated traits in proportions that differed between populations. Yield losses reached 50% in heavily infested patches. Our results suggest that weedy sunflowers may have arisen through the hybridization of cultivated and wild sunflower, potentially during the seed production process. Such crop-wild hybrids would have been introduced recurrently into fields through the seed lots, where they evolved to locally invasive weedy populations.
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We thank Muriel Tavaud for careful reading of the manuscript. We thank the Bureau des Ressources Génétiques for funding this project.
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Muller, MH., Délieux, F., Fernández-Martínez, J.M. et al. Occurrence, distribution and distinctive morphological traits of weedy Helianthus annuus L. populations in Spain and France. Genet Resour Crop Evol 56, 869–877 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-009-9409-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-009-9409-3