Weed phyto-sociology and diversity in relation to conservation agriculture and weed management strategies in Northwestern Himalayas of India

To create weed management techniques capable of improving agroecosystem sustainability, it is essential to comprehend the different weed flora composition and diversification dynamics in conservation agriculture production systems. In North Western Himalaya from 2018 to 2020, evaluation of various tillage techniques with and without residue incorporation and weed management techniques on diverse weed flora composition was performed. Fifteen treatment amalgamations of five tillages viz. CT (conventional tillage) in maize-CT in wheat, CT-ZT (ZT, zero tillage), ZT-ZT, ZT-ZTR (ZTR, zero tillage in amalgamation with remainder integration) (HW, hand weeding) were calculated in strip plot design. Significant differences (p = 0.05) of weed density and total weed count were recorded during summer (maize) and winter (wheat) seasons. Among tillage treatments, lowest weed population and total weed population were recorded in conservation tillage (ZTR-ZTR) in summer and conservative tillage followed by zero tillage in winter season (CT-ZT), respectively. IWM-IWM and H-H had a least weed population and total weed population in summer and winter seasons, respectively. Highest important value index during summer and winter seasons was recorded in Echinochloa colona (55.90%) and Avena ludoviciana (76.99%), respectively. Higher Shannon Wiener index and Evenness were recorded for CT+HW-CT+HW (1.83, 0.91) and ZT+IWM-ZTR+IWM (1.73, 0.86) which indicate higher weed species diversity during summer and winter seasons, respectively. ZTR-ZTR led to less diverse weed diversity compared to intensive conventional tillage (CT-CT) practices. However, higher Simpson’s diversity was recorded for CT+HW-CT+HW, i.e. 0.83 and 0.82 for maize and wheat, respectively, compared to the other conventional tillage treatments. This study helps in understanding the crop-weed relation such that the implementation of sound and economic weeds management strategies. Further, long-term experiments are required in order to interpret the complicated relationships of diverse weed species under different tillage and weed management strategies for sustainable and adoptive conservation agriculture production system for North Western Himalayas.