Abiotic stress management in fruit crops

Abstract

With nutritional benefits, fruits are important part of human diets. These crops not only play an important role in nutritional security but also offer gainful employment and enhanced income to the farmers' community. However, the abiotic stresses, encountered at critical growth stages, adversely affect their productivity. Further, climate change is likely to increase frequency, intensity, and duration of abiotic stresses. The main abiotic stresses affecting tropical fruit crops in India are the drought/water-deficit, high temperature, and salinity stresses. These stresses cause many morphological, anatomical, physiological, and biochemical changes ultimately impacting both their productivity and quality. Thus, thorough understanding of the adverse influence of abiotic stresses on different crop species is imperative for devising innovative horticultural practices for overcoming the adverse impacts. Timely intervention with appropriate adaptation strategies would help in realizing sustainable yields. Practices like providing irrigation at critical stages, adopting micro-irrigation, use of growth regulators, soil mulching, amendments, and nutrient management need to be implemented for alleviating adverse effects. The advanced irrigation methods like partial root-zone drying (PRD) are another option for limited water conditions. The inclusion of tolerant crops or cultivars and adoption of tolerant rootstocks to graft the choice cultivars would further enable the farmers to overcome adverse effects of abiotic stresses. The focus should be on developing integrated crop-specific adaptation strategies. Integration of all available adaptation options would be the most effective approach in sustaining the production and productivity of fruit crops under abiotic stresses.