Weed composition may vary because of natural environment, management
practices, and their interactions. In this study we presented a systematic
approach for analyzing the relative importance of environmental and
management factors on weed composition of the most conspicuous species in
sugarcane. A data-mining approach represented by k-means
cluster and classification and regression trees (CART) were used for
analyzing the 11 most frequent weeds recorded in sugarcane cropping systems
of northern Argentina. Data of weed abundance and explanatory factors
contained records from 1976 sugarcane fields over 2 consecutive years. The
k-means method selected five different weed clusters.
One cluster contained 44% of the data and exhibited the lowest overall weed
abundance. The other four clusters were dominated by three perennial
species, bermudagrass, johnsongrass, and purple nutsedge, and the annual
itchgrass. The CART model was able to explain 44% of the sugarcane's weed
composition variability. Four of the five clusters were represented in the
terminal nodes of the final CART model. Sugarcane burning before harvesting
was the first factor selected in the CART, and all nodes resulting from this
split were characterized by low abundance of weeds. Regarding the predictive
power of the variables, rainfall and the genotype identity were the most
important predictors. These results have management implications as they
indicate that the genotype identity would be a more important factor than
crop age when designing sugarcane weed management. Moreover, the abiotic
control of crop–weed interaction would be more related to rainfall than the
environmental heterogeneity related to soil type, for example soil
fertility. Although all these exploratory patterns resulting from the CART
data-mining procedure should be refined, it became clear that this
information may be used to develop an experimental framework to study the
factors driving weed assembly.