Residual effects of biochar on improving growth, physiology and yield of wheat under salt stress
Saqib Saleem Akhtar,
Mathias Neumann Andersen and
Fulai Liu
Agricultural Water Management, 2015, vol. 158, issue C, 61-68
Abstract:
Salinity is one of the major threats to global food security. Biochar amendment could alleviate the negative impacts of salt stress in crop in the season. However, its long-term residual effect on reducing Na+ uptake in latter crops remains unknown. A pot experiment with wheat was conducted in a greenhouse. The soil used was from an earlier experiment on potato where the plants were irrigated with tap water (S0), 25mM (S1) and 50mM (S2) NaCl solutions and with 0 and 5% (w/w) biochar amendment. At onset of the experiment, three different EC levels at S0, S1 and S2 were established in the non-biochar control (2.3, 7.2 and 10.9dSm−1) and the biochar amended (2.8, 8.1 and 11.8dSm−1) soils, respectively. A column leaching experiment was also conducted in the greenhouse to study the adsorption capacity of biochar to Na+. The results indicated that biochar addition reduced plant sodium uptake by transient Na+ binding due to its high adsorption capacity, decreasing osmotic stress by enhancing soil moisture content, and by releasing mineral nutrients (particularly K+, Ca++, Mg++) into the soil solution. Growth, physiology and yield of wheat were affected positively with biochar amendment, particularly under high salinity level. It was concluded that addition of biochar had significant residual effect on reducing Na+ uptake in wheat under salinity stress. However, more detailed field studies should be carried out to evaluate the long-term residual effects of biochar for sustaining crop production in saline soils.
Keywords: Biochar; Residual effect; Salinity; Sodium; Adsorption; Physiology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377415001353
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:158:y:2015:i:c:p:61-68
DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2015.04.010
Access Statistics for this article
Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns
More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).