Improving agricultural water use efficiency in arid and semiarid areas of China

The mutual responses of higher plants to environment: Physiological and microbiological aspects

“…Besides, plant responses to soil water deficits take a "slow-fast-slow" shaped curve in terms of main physio-biochemical indices change and this is in agreement with Plant Growth Grand Periodicity, which also illustrates this fact and the wide plasticity for plants [29,31,32,101,102]. Surely, concerted expression of corresponding genes in plant gene regulatory network system makes it possible that we can see the phenotype and phenotype change under given temporal-spatial condition [23,24,82,83,93,95].…”

“…Plants live in soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) environment, and they have to coordinate the mechanisms of diverse types to respond to the above changing environment at any time for sustainable survival [4][5][6][7][8][9][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. Plant production realization is obtained eventually through physiological pathways at least at the level of individual and community [102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109]120,[130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140].…”

“…Water deficits in soil environment also influence solute transport (ion and nutrient uptake of plants) to larger extent, which effects on photosynthetic reactions in plant chloroplasts in many ways [117,120,131,135,[139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147]. This is the reason that ion homeostasis and redox state have been brought to attention [4][5][6][7][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119]. The series of the above reactions and processes occurring at different soil-root biointerfaces is regulated and controlled by plant gene regulatory network system spatially and temporally on the basis of responding to plant developmental cues, through which plants can elegantly respond to the changing environment [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]…”

“…Abiotic and biotic stress factors have some common signal and responding pathways in plants and thereby can be utilized potentially by cross-signaling [14,93,118,119]. Further, sessile plants have to get alone with the dynamics of changing environmental conditions and have the flexibility for responding to these complicated changes [10,11,15,16], and this has to be achieved at the various stages of plant development [23,24,37,40,47,[102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109]. Considering the interacting complexity (at least including water movement, solute transport, information exchange, ion homeostasis regulation, and other related physi-chemical changes) between plants and their surroundings, it is important to understand physiological functions for higher plants under environment.…”

Impacts of soil and water pollution on food safety and health risks in China

“…Most research papers to date have focused on the relationships between crop yield and water resources (Wang et al, 2008b;Piao et al, 2010;Peng, 2011), water use efficiency (Deng et al, 2006;Fan et al, 2011), infrastructure (Lohmar et al, 2003), agricultural management (Hu et al, 2006) and climate change (Piao et al, 2010;Grassini and Cassman, 2012;Wei et al, 2014), while few studies have investigated the effects of surface water pollution on grain quality at the national scale. There are clear implications for sustainably managing available water supplies, understanding the nature and magnitude of demands, analyzing the factors affecting water quality, and developing policies to ensure continued growth in agricultural production.…”