Biological Approaches for Assessment and Management of abiotic stress for Resilient Agriculture

Abstract

The impact of abiotic stresses such as extreme temperatures, drought, water logging, high salinity, heavy metal toxicity, limiting crop productivity and sustainability are being witnessed all over the world. In order to sustain crop productivity, it is therefore crucial to establish simple and low cost technology for abiotic stress management. Natural resource management strategies can play a significant role, in this respect, as it has strong influence on soil resistance to check deterioration of soil health through selective influence on microbes and its functional attributes. These selective attributes are the indicator of soil resistance to different stresses. Identification of resistant microbes to extreme environments and their successful deployment in rhizosphere can be another significant approach to induce systemic resistance in plants to sustain productivity under stressful environment. However, extensive research for development of the technology and its assessment under diverse agro-ecological condition should be accomplished before recommendation. This paper reviews the literatures on impact of abiotic stress on agriculture, different aspects of soil resistance and resilience, its assessment and management strategies to combat the upcoming stress for resilient Agriculture. Till now, a lot of work on soil resistance to stress has been accomplished. So far soil physical and chemical attributes were given priority to assess the resistance capacity of a soil to different stresses, in general, compaction, water logging, nutrient toxicity etc., in particular. The dynamic soil characteristics such as microbial community structure and soil specific functions, in general, enzymes activities are known to respond more quickly to changing environmental conditions and crop management practices than total or available soil organic carbon or other available soil nutrients. Therefore, use of microbes and their enzymes systems as well as soil functional attributes are current leads to asses soil resistance to abiotic stress, which results in deterioration of soil health and ultimately to poor crop quality.