Plant communities responses and effects in railway environment

Abstract Weed control in rail environment is essential to ensure safe and efficient train operation. Until May 2019, the RATP Group ( Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens , Autonomous Parisian Transportation Administration) exclusively used glyphosate for weed management on its open‐air railway network. Since then, the company stopped using chemical herbicides, making it imperative to find alternative solutions for weed management. Weeding requests from train drivers or service agents have become more and more numerous since 2019. They are recorded and located along the railway tracks to trigger weeding operations by mowing or grubbing up. In 2021, a plant inventory was conducted to identify plant species across tracks and their surroundings. Two hundred and fifty‐five different species were observed across 394 vegetation surveys. We characterised weed communities according to their location and compared biodiversity indices on tracks and in the adjacent embankments. Our results showed that weed communities were generally less diverse on tracks, but some species were adapted to both situations. We also found that certain plant species were associated with a higher number of weeding requests, likely due to their potential danger to train circulation. On railway tracks, risky species seem to originate from adjacent embankments. To better understand the characteristics of these species, we described their functional traits to link them with their possible effect on railway‐related activities, particularly maintenance work and train safety operations, and their response to environment. This knowledge is crucial to characterise species and communities that are associated with weeding requests and the factors explaining the presence of these species.