Drought is a serious threat to the farming community, biasing the crop productivity in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Drought adversely affects seed germination, plant growth, and development via non-normal physiological processes. Plants generally acclimatize to drought stress through various tolerance mechanisms, but the changes in global climate and modern agricultural systems have further worsened the crop productivity. In order to increase the production and productivity, several strategies such as the breeding of tolerant varieties and exogenous application of growth regulators, osmoprotectants, and plant mineral nutrients are followed to mitigate the effects of drought stress. Nevertheless, the complex nature of drought stress makes these strategies ineffective in benefiting the farming community. Seed priming is an alternative, low-cost, and feasible technique, which can improve drought stress tolerance through enhanced and advanced seed germination. Primed seeds can retain the memory of previous stress and enable protection against oxidative stress through earlier activation of the cellular defense mechanism, reduced imbibition time, upsurge of germination promoters, and osmotic regulation. However, a better understanding of the metabolic events during the priming treatment is needed to use this technology in a more efficient way. Interestingly, the review highlights the morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses of seed priming for enhancing the drought tolerance in crop plants. Furthermore, the challenges and opportunities associated with various priming methods are also addressed side-by-side to enable the use of this simple and cost-efficient technique in a more efficient manner.

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The present study was investigated for soil bioremediation through sababul plant biomass (Leucaena leucocephala). The soil contaminated with textile effluent was collected from Erode (chithode) area. Various physico-chemical characterizations like N, P, and K and electrical conductivity were assessed on both control and dye contaminated soils before and after remediation. Sababul (L. leucocephala) powder used as plant biomass for remediation was a tool for textile dye removal using basic synthetic dyes by column packing and eluting. The concentration of the dye eluted was compared with its original concentration of dye and were analyzed by using UV-vis spectrophotometer. Sababul plant biomass was analyzed for its physico-chemical properties and active compounds were detected by GC-MS, HPTLC and FTIR. Plant growth was assessed with green gram on the textile contaminated soil and sababul had the potential of adsorbing the dye as the contaminated soil and also check the growth of green gram.

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The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has many attractive and desired features to cope with uncertain weather conditions and also provides superlative resolution in images. In this paper, a unique multiscale approach of change detection (CD) that integrates the preprocessing and CD technique of SAR imagery is discussed. Condensed anisotropic diffusion method is employed as a preprocessing tool for despeckling, and the resultant image is processed by multiscale approach in the Laplacian pyramid (LP) domain. In each layer of LP, the difference between the pyramid coefficient of two images of the same area obtained at different periods is estimated through log ratio operation. Each layer of pyramid coefficient has explicit features at particular scale. Fine scale related to a band pass layer localizes edges of the change area and the coarse scale related to a low pass layer preserves more detail information of the change region. Reconstruction of LP provides exact difference image with perfect boundary. Otsu's algorithm is used to generate binary change map to distinguish changed and unchanged pixels. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested by using simulated and real SAR image datasets. The confusion matrix parameters are used to prove competence of the proposed CD method.

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