Four years validation of decision support optimising herbicide dose in cereals under Spanish conditions

The Danish decision support system Crop Protection Online (CPO) optimises herbicide weed control. CPO recommends specific herbicide solutions to achieve a required level of control. The aim is to apply herbicides as little as possible but as much as necessary. CPOWeeds is a version of CPO adjusted to conditions in North-eastern Spain. The predicted efficacies and the yield obtained with CPOWeeds were validated in winter cereal field trials from 2010 to 2013. All CPOWeeds treatments were related to the efficacies obtained with standard herbicide treatments decided upon by local advisors. The predictions from CPOWeeds were compared to the actually achieved efficacies in the field trials for the nine weed species at different developmental stages and for 84.2% of the comparisons the obtained efficacies were equal to or higher than predicted. The average difference between predicted and observed efficacies was 2.35 percentage points. Yield was measured in three trials and the recommendations from CPOWeeds were maintaining yield. There were two situations where CPOWeeds were performing suboptimal. One is in the early weed growth stages, as the model is not yet prepared to account for water stress on root action herbicides applied at 10-11 BBCH. The second situation was in fields with a prior unidentified population of resistant Alopecurus myosuroides. For key species in winter cereals in Spain, such as Avena sterilis, Lolium rigidum and Papaver rhoeas, CPOWeeds achieved a satisfactory control level. It was concluded that the use of CPOWeeds allowed optimisation of the herbicide application with a very high robustness. The recommendations were satisfactorily for the conditions of the Northeast of Spain and have the potential to decrease the amount of applied herbicides by at least 30%. Therefore, it can be an important tool in Integrated Weed Management.