Parasitic Plants Management

Dear Colleagues,

Plant-parasitic plants are fascinating examples of plant evolution. They live in balance with other organisms in natural ecosystems, in contrast to most parasitic weeds that severely attack crops, reducing their yield and rendering agricultural lands uncultivable worldwide. The control of parasitic weeds is challenging because of the lack of control methods that are selective enough to kill the weeds without damaging the crop to which they are physically and biochemically attached. The management of parasitic weeds is also hindered by their high fecundity, dispersal efficiency, persistent seedbank, and rapid responses to changes in agricultural practices, which allow them to adapt to new hosts and manifest increased aggressiveness against new resistant cultivars. This Special Issue aims to address the sustainability of parasitic weed management by presenting new knowledge and emerging technologies in the following fields:

• Biology and physiology of weed parasitism.
• Breeding crops for resistance to parasitic weed infection.
• Traditional herbicides.
• Screening of natural products for the discovery of novel herbicides.
• Biological control.
• Allelopathic crops.
• Genetic engineering.
• Integrated parasitic weed management.
• Technology transfer to farmers. Integration in the socio-economic context to be a functional part of the crop health management.
• Evolutionary trends: changing host specificities, increased virulence, herbicide resistance.
• Ecology of parasitic weed interaction with autotrophic weeds and microbial communities.

Dr. Mónica Fernández-Aparicio

Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.