Combating soil salinity with combining saline agriculture and phytomanagement with salt-accumulating plants

Abstract

Salinity poses serious threats to landscapes across the globe, decreasing the capacity of all types of terrestrial ecosystems in providing services by threatening our biodiversity, lowering agricultural productivity, deteriorating the environment, contaminating groundwater below standard level, enhancing flood risks, food security issues and restricting the economic growth of a community. Reclamation measures are required to reverse the process of land degradation caused by salinization; otherwise, the trend towards salinization is expected to grow beyond control in developing countries. The scientific community and the policy-makers around the globe have been testing long-term technologies including physicochemical, conventional breeding and genetic engineering involving state of the art molecular tools for more than three decades. Nevertheless, they have failed due to reasons like non-technical feasibility reports, reliability and affordability issues coupled with sustainability constraints at field level. This review discusses the potential prospects of Pennisetum genus (Poaceae) for integrated, sustainable, robust and profitable saline agriculture based on phytoremediation agro-technique. Our approach is the first ever record, providing a novel insight into a cost-effective biotech agro-technique. Pennisetum species are environment-friendly future candidates with prospects for all stakeholders to materialize higher average productivity at the field level, posing lesser competition for resources with standard conventional crops.

Keywords:

• Pennisetum
• salinity
• secondary salinization
• phytomanagement
• saline agriculture
• non-conventional crop
• biotech approach
• Bioenergy production

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program [grant numbers 2016YFD0800807, 2016YFD0800803, 2016YFD0801106], the National Nature Science Foundations of China [grant numbers 31702003], Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST [grant numbers 2017QNRC001], Sponsored by “Chenguang Program” supported by Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission [grant numbers 17CG07].