A database of weed plants in the European part of Russia

Abstract

Weeds are plants that, although not specially cultivated, grow and often adapt to growing in arable lands. They form an ecological variant of flora, as a historically-formed set of species growing on cultivated soils. For the rational use of the chemical and biological crop protection products and to produce safe and high-quality food, up-to-date data on the floristic diversity of weeds and the patterns of its geographical change are required. The need for a weeds' database arises that allows many specialists to work together independently. However, the great value of any database lies not in its existence, but in the accumulation of data that can be used to analyse the factors affecting the species diversity of weeds. A dataset of weed species diversity and their distribution in the European part of Russia, based on the results of the authors' own research from 1999 to 2019, has been created. The dataset includes 24,284 observations of occurrences of weed plants, which were obtained on the basis of 2,049 relevés of segetal plant communities in seven regions of the European part of Russia. In total, the dataset includes information about 329 species of vascular plants growing in 65 farmlands: cereals, spring and winter crops, industrial crops, row crops and perennial grasses (Tretyakova et al. 2020).