Over the last 30 years, many studies have surveyed weed vegetation on arable land. The 'Arable Weeds and Management in Europe' (AWME) database is a collection of 36 of these surveys and the associated management data. Here, we review the challenges associated with combining disparate datasets and explore some of the opportunities for future research that present themselves thanks to the AWME database. We present three case studies repeating previously published national scale analyses with data from a larger spatial extent. The case studies, originally done in France, Germany and the UK, explore various aspects of weed ecology (community composition, management and environmental effects and within-field distributions) and use a range of statistical techniques (canonical correspondence analysis, redundancy analysis and generalised linear mixed models) to demonstrate the utility and versatility of the AWME database. We demonstrate that (i) the standardisation of abundance data to a common measure, before the analysis of the combined dataset, has little impact on the outcome of the analyses, (ii) the increased extent of environmental or management gradients allows for greater confidence in conclusions and (iii) the main conclusions of analyses done at different spatial scales remain consistent. These case studies demonstrate the utility of a Europe-wide weed survey database, for clarifying or extending results obtained from studies at smaller scales. This Europe-wide data collection offers many more opportunities for analysis that could not be addressed in smaller datasets; including questions about the effects of climate change, macro-ecological and biogeographical issues related to weed diversity as well as the dominance or rarity of specific weeds in Europe.

Agroécologie AgroSup Dijon INRAE Université de Bourgogne Franche Comté Dijon Cedex France

Crop Health Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences University of Rostock Rostock Germany

Cultivar Testing Nursery and Genebank Resources Department National Institute for Horticultural Research Skierniewice Poland

Department of Agricultural Forest and Food Sciences University of Torino Grugliasco Italy

Department of Agrifood Engineering and Biotechnology Politechnical University of Catalunya Castelldefels Spain

Department of Agroecology and Crop Production Faculty of Agrobiology Food and Natural Resources Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Praha Suchdol Czech Republic

Department of Plant Protection National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology Spanish National Research Council Madrid Spain

Department of Weed Science Institute of Phytomedicine Faculty of Agricultural Sciences University of Hohenheim Stuttgart Germany

Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences Széchenyi István University Mosonmagyaróvár Hungary

Institute for Plant Protection in Field Crops and Grassland Julius Kuehn Institut Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants Braunschweig Germany

Institute for Plant Protection Research 'Agrihorts' Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies Jelgava Latvia

Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible Spanish National Research Council Córdoba Spain

Net Zero and Resilient Farming Rothamsted Research West Common Harpenden Hertfordshire UK

Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Institute National Research Institute National Centre for Plant Genetic Resources Błonie Poland

Plant Health Laboratory Anses Montferrier sur Lez France

Provision of Biodiversity in Agrarian Systems Research Area 2 Land Use and Governance Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research Müncheberg Müncheberg Germany

Sistemas Agrícolas Forestales y Medio Ambiente Plant Protection Agrifood Research and Technology Centre of Aragón Zaragoza Spain

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