Reviewing research priorities in weed ecology, evolution and management: a horizon scan

Weedy plants pose a major threat to food security, biodiversity, ecosystem services and consequently to human health and wellbeing. However, many currently used weed management approaches are increasingly unsustainable. To address this knowledge and practice gap, in June 2014, 35 weed and invasion ecologists, weed scientists, evolutionary biologists and social scientists convened a workshop to explore current and future perspectives and approaches in weed ecology and management. A horizon scanning exercise ranked a list of 124 pre-submitted questions to identify a priority list of 30 questions. These questions are discussed under seven themed headings that represent areas for renewed and emerging focus for the disciplines of weed research and practice. The themed areas considered the need for transdisciplinarity, increased adoption of integrated weed management and agroecological approaches, better understanding of weed evolution, climate change, weed invasiveness and finally, disciplinary challenges for weed science. Almost all the challenges identified rested on the need for continued efforts to diversify and integrate agroecological, socio-economic and technological approaches in weed management. These challenges are not newly conceived, though their continued prominence as research priorities highlights an ongoing intransigence that must be addressed through a more system-oriented and transdisciplinary research agenda that seeks an embedded integration of public and private research approaches. This horizon scanning exercise thus set out the building blocks needed for future weed management research and practice; however, the challenge ahead is to identify effective ways in which sufficient research and implementation efforts can be directed towards these needs.

Extensionality with Respect to Indistinguishability Operators

Extensionality is explored form different points of view. Extensional fuzzy subsets from a fuzzy equivalence relation E are considered as observable subsets with respect to the granularity generated by E. Interestingly, they are characterized as the fuzzy subsets that can be obtained as combinations of the fuzzy equivalence classes of E. Extensional mappings are characterized topologically and the set of extensional mappings between two universes are algebraically determined. Specifying the results to fuzzy mappings from a universe X onto [0, 1] an interpretation of type-2 fuzzy subsets of X as fuzzification of its type-1 fuzzy subsets is provided.

Normalizing Possibility Distributions Using t-Norms

A new approach to normalizing fuzzy sets is introduced where it is assumed that the normalization method is compatible with a given t-norm. In this context it is proved that the most usual ways to normalize fuzzy subsets correspond to the most common t-norms.

For a given fuzzy subset μ, the corresponding normalized fuzzy subset [Formula: see text] can be viewed as the distribution of μ conditioned on the (degree of) existence of its elements with maximal membership. From this view point we investigate the less specific normal fuzzy subset of X among the most similar fuzzy subsets to μ and the normal fuzzy subset generating the same fuzzy T-preorder as μ.