Amatrop: an open-access collection of weed survey datasets of tropical cropping systems

Weeds cause more damage to crops than all other pests, particularly in tropical areas, but despite years of work and many studies, they are still insufficiently understood to develop functional approaches to tropical weed communities at a global level. Amatrop Dataverse contains 30 datasets from weed surveys carried between 1988 and 2020 in tropical cropping systems mainly in Africa and Islands in the Indian Ocean. All the datasets were homogenized and standardized to facilitate the concatenation of files for global statistical analyses. An additional dataset contains the reference weed flora (1,789 taxa) contained in all the datasets, with updated botanical nomenclature. Amatrop Dataverse currently contains records of 8,718 field surveys and of the occurrence of 109,120 weed species in multi-site and single-site surveys, weighted and unweighted floristical records from farmers' fields or experimental studies. This new dataverse already contains considerable knowledge on tropical weeds for a better understanding of weed behaviour in cropping systems and to improve weed management by farmers.