In recent years, herbicide resistance has attracted much attention as an increasingly urgent problem worldwide. Unfortunately, most of that effort was focused on confirmation of resistance and characterization of the mechanisms of resistance. For management purposes, knowledge about biology and ecology of the resistant weed phenotypes is critical. This includes fitness of the resistant biotypes compared with the corresponding wild biotypes. Accordingly, fitness has been the subject of many studies; however, lack of consensus on the concept of fitness resulted in poor experimental designs and misinterpretation of the ensuing data. In recent years, methodological protocols for conducting proper fitness studies have been proposed; however, we think these methods should be reconsidered from a herbicide-resistance management viewpoint. In addition, a discussion of the inherent challenges associated with fitness cost studies is pertinent. We believe that the methodological requirements for fitness studies of herbicide-resistant weed biotypes might differ from those applied in other scientific disciplines such as evolutionary ecology and genetics. Moreover, another important question is to what extent controlling genetic background is necessary when the aim of a fitness study is developing management practices for resistant biotypes. Among the methods available to control genetic background, we suggest two approaches (single population and pedigreed lines) as the most appropriate methods to detect differences between resistant (R) and susceptible (S) populations and to derive herbicide-resistant weed management programs. Based on these two methods, we suggest two new approaches that we named the “recurrent single population” and “recurrent pedigreed lines” methods. Importantly, whenever the aim of a fitness study is to develop optimal resistance management, we suggest selecting R and S plants within a single population and evaluating all fitness components from seed to seed instead of measuring changes in the frequency of R and S alleles through multigenerational fitness studies.

In recent years germination experiments have become more and more complex. Typically, they are replicated in time as independent runs and at each time point they involve hierarchical, often factorial experimental designs, which are now commonly analysed by means of linear mixed models. However, in order to characterize germination in response to time elapsed, specific event-time models are needed and mixed model extensions of these models are not readily available, neither in theory nor in practice. As a practical workaround we propose a two-step approach that combines and weighs together results from event-time models fitted separately to data from each germination test by means of meta-analytic random effects models. We show that this approach provides a more appropriate appreciation of the sources of variation in hierarchically structured germination experiments as both between- and within-experiment variation may be recovered from the data.

Attention should be devoted to weeds evolving herbicide resistance with non-target-site resistance (NTSR) mechanism due to their unpredictable resistance patterns. Quantification of fitness cost can be used in NTSR management strategies to determine the long-term fate of resistant plants in weed populations. To our knowledge, this is the first report evaluating potential fecundity and vegetative fitness of a NTSR black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides Huds), the most important herbicide resistant weed in Europe, with controlled genetic background. The susceptible (S) and NTSR sub-populations were identified and isolated from a fenoxaprop-P-ethyl resistant population by a plant cloning technique. Using a target-neighborhood design, competitive responses of S and NTSR black-grass sub-populations to increasing density of winter wheat were quantified for 2 years in greenhouse and 1 year in field. Fitness traits including potential seed production, vegetative biomass and tiller number of both sub-populations significantly decreased with increasing density of winter wheat. More importantly, no statistically significant differences were found in fitness traits between S and NTSR sub-populations either grown alone (no competition) or in competition with winter wheat. According to the results, the NTSR black-grass is probably to persist in field even in the cessation of fenoxaprop-P-ethyl. So, effective herbicide resistant management strategies are strongly suggested to prevent and stop the spread of the NTSR black-grass, otherwise NTSR loci conferring resistance to a range of herbicides in black-grass will persist in the gene pool even in the absence of herbicide application. Consequently, herbicide as an effective tool for control of black-grass will gradually be lost in fields infested by NTSR black-grass.