Avena fatua
species of plant, wild oat
Avena fatua is a species of grass in the oat genus. It is known as the common wild oat. Like fellow wild oat species A. sterilis, it bears 42 chromosomes, and its seeds shatter at maturity for yearly seeding. This oat is native to Eurasia (particularly the eastern Mediterranean) but it has been introduced to most of the other temperate regions of the world. It is naturalized in some areas and considered a noxious weed in others.
A. fatua is a typical oat in appearance, a green grass with hollow, erect stems 1 to 4 feet (0.30 to 1.22 m) tall bearing nodding structures – panicles – of spikelets. The long dark green leaves are up to 1 centimetre (0.39 in) wide and rough due to small hairs. The seedlings are also hairy. The seed kernel is thinner, longer, darker and hairy when compared with the seed of the common cultivated oat (A. sativa). This species and other wild oats can become troublesome in prairie agriculture when it invades and lowers the quality of a field crop, or competes for resources with the crop plants.
“Avena fatua” enters the record as species of plant, wild oat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Avena, fatua and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q158634. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Avena fatua” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.