New or recently introduced weeds are biological pollutants in our natural and agricultural ecosystems. Unlike chemical pollutants, new weeds left unchecked often proliferate and pose problems that may not become apparent until eradication is too expensive or impractical. Management strategies for weeds should include: 1. prevention (from entering foreign commerce); 2. exclusion (detection of weed contaminants in imported products at ports of entry); 3. detection, containment, and eradication of incipient infestations; and 4. perpetual control (of widespread species that cannot otherwise be addressed). Appropriate legislative authority, modern weed technology, funding, and a renewed commitment to the concept of prevention are needed to prevent the introduction of new weeds. A national initiative to prevent the establishment of new weeds would be beneficial by saving on future losses and perpetual control costs. Actions taken now will prevent the continued introduction and spread of new weeds in the United States.

Global positioning systems (GPS) technology, developed by the Department of Defense, enable accurate documentation of Cartesian coordinates anywhere on the earth's surface. Surveying, mapping, positioning, and subsequent management of weed infestations can be expedited with this technology. Positions and boundaries of infestation may be located with 10-m or better accuracy while the GPS receiver is continuously moving, and with 2-m or better accuracy with brief stops for repeated sampling. GPS data agreed closely with U.S. Geological Survey data. Coordinates for a weed infestation may be relocated for treatment, evaluation or other purposes. Basic geographic information systems (GIS) map features from Digital Line Graph (DLG), Topologically Integrated Encoding and Reference Systems (TIGER) and other sources of information may be used to fully integrate delimiting survey results from GPS readings in order to develop weed management plans.

Weed management is complicated by the presence of soil seed banks. The complexity of soil–seed interactions means that seed persistence in the field is often difficult to measure, let alone predict. Field trials, although accurate in their context, are time-consuming and expensive to conduct for individual species. Some ex situ techniques for estimating seed life expectancy have been proposed, but these fail to simulate the environmental complexity of the field. Also, it has been questioned whether techniques such as the controlled aging test (CAT) are useful indicators of field persistence. This study aimed to test the validity of the standard CAT (seed aging at 45 C and 60% relative humidity) in use at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, U.K., for predicting field seed-persistence. Comparison of seed persistence and CAT data for 27 northwest European species suggested a significant positive correlation of 0.31. Subsequently, 13 species of emerging and common weeds of Queensland were assessed for their seed longevity using the CAT. The seed longevity data of these species in the CAT were linked with field seed-persistence data according to three broad seed-persistence categories: < 1 yr, 1 to 3 yr, and > 3 yr. We discuss the scope for using the CAT as a tool for rapid assignment of species to these categories. There is a need for further studies that compare predictions of seed persistence based on the CAT with seed persistence in the field for a larger range of species and environments.