Summary
Intercropping has been advocated as an environmentally benign method to suppress weeds in agriculture. However, it is not evident from the literature what size of weed suppressive effect is achieved on average by intercropping, and how species choice and crop management affect this effect. We conducted a global meta-analysis of published data to quantify the effect of intercropping on weed biomass in annual arable intercrops grown for their final product. We searched the literature to identify all papers reporting usable experimental data and extracted 339 data records from 39 publications containing data from 76 independent experiments. Two metrics of weed suppression were defined to assess the weed suppressive effect of intercropping: the ratio of observed weed biomass in an intercrop to
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