Salt-induced growth promotion in rice varieties during nursery

Abstract

Climate change will increase the occurrence of salinity in agricultural land along with the coastal areas. One of the technologies to reduce salinity is NaCl pretreatment. This study aimed to evaluate salinity treatment's effect during nurseries on the growth of lowland rice seedlings. There were three separate experiments, and all the experiments used Randomized Complete Block Design. In the first experiment, local black rice seeds (var. Jelitheng) was used. The nursery was carried out at three salinity levels, i.e. 0.2, 3 and 5 dS/m. The second experiment was conducted using salt-resistant rice seeds (var. Dendang) and salt susceptible rice seeds (var. IR 64). The salinity levels applied were non-saline (0.2 dS/m) and saline (5 dS/m). The third experiment used rice seedling var. IR 64, with the first factor being the salinity level (0.2 and 5 dS/m) and the second factor was a wet nursery and dry nursery. In general, the results from the three experiments showed that giving salinity levels of 3-5 dS/m in several rice varieties improved seedling performance. Although salinity during nursery could increase the concentration of Na+ and decrease the concentration of K+ in leaves, salinity during nursery increased the seedlings fresh weight, and dry weight increased the number of seedlings leaves and increased the concentration of leaf chlorophyll. The better seedlings growth variable in the saline nursery will help the plants cope with salinity in the later growth stage in the field.