Journal of Ecology and Environment

pISSN 2287-8327 eISSN 2288-1220

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Published online August 9, 2024
https://doi.org/10.5141/jee.24.064

Journal of Ecology and Environment (2024) 48:28

Effect of seeding density on the weediness potential of transgenic plants: a case study on sunflowers

Kyong-Hee Nam1* , Sung Min Han1 , Seong-Jun Chun1 , Jun-Woo Lee1 and Jihoon Kim1,2

1LMO Team, National Institute of Ecology, Seocheon 33657, Republic of Korea
2Department of Biology, Wonkwang University, Iksan 54538, Republic of Korea

Correspondence to:Kyong-Hee Nam
E-mail khnam@nie.re.kr

Received: June 26, 2024; Revised: July 12, 2024; Accepted: July 19, 2024

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The publisher of this article is The Ecological Society of Korea in collaboration with The Korean Society of Limnology

Abstract

Background: Newly introduced transgenic plants can outcompete native species in natural ecosystems, threatening the biodiversity of a country. This study ascertained the weediness potential of plants according to the seed amount under the assumption that transgenic seeds were unintentionally spilled. Using sunflowers as the study system, 0, 50, 100, and 150 seeds were sown in 1 m × 1 m and 2 m × 2 m plots, and seed germination, survival, flowering, and competition between the surviving and wild plants were investigated.
Results: There was no significant difference in the germination rate of sunflowers depending on the cultivar, but differences were observed depending on the sowing density and plot size. As the number of seeds sown increased, the flowering and seed maturation of sprouted plants occurred earlier; the plant height and flower length of the surviving plants decreased. In addition, as the number of seeds increased, not only did the early importance of sunflowers increase, but the period of dominance over weeds also improved.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the weediness potential of sunflowers varies with the number of seeds at the time of release, which may affect germination and growth, and compete with weeds in transgenic plants.

Keywords: invasiveness, living modified organism, natural ecosystem, risk assessment, transgenic plant, weediness

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Journal of Ecology and Environment

pISSN 2287-8327 eISSN 2288-1220