Salinity Stress on Plants Essay examples

Plants are found everywhere on earth, up high on the ridge and down low in caves and caverns. The types of plants that live in these places depends on many factors. These factors are separated into two different categories, the biotic factors and the abiotic factors. Some of the biotic factors include, predation, competition, and habitat destruction. Plants with limited competition and large amounts of resources will be in a higher abundance than plants with limited resources and higher competition rates will be confined to areas and either out competed or will be the dominant species. Certain plants adapt to these factors and thrive and others don’t do as well. Some of the abiotic factors include, sunlight, water, temperature, and wind. These

6. Describe several adaptations that enable plants to reduce water loss from their leaves. Include both structural and physiological adaptations.

2. What do you think would happen if you watered your houseplants with salt water?

If saltwater is applied to a plant, the plant would shrivel up and die. This is a result of the water moving out of the cells in order to try to balance the concentration of solute compared to inside the cell. The water movement out of the cell would cause the cell to shrink and the lack of water would eventually cause the plant to die.

7) What would happen if you applied saltwater to a plant? The saltwater has a lower water potential due to the solute, and therefore water would move out of the plant, dehydrating it.

When salinity increases, warning signs appear in the landscapes of the affected areas. These warning signs include things like sick and/or dying trees, declining vegetation, colonisation of tolerant weed-like plants, bare patches where vegetation has died and saline pools in creek beds. These show that the ecosystem is being affected and at a high rate.

Saline environments tend to hinder agricultural production by lowering crop yields, often quite substantially. The traditional response to the threat of salinity-induced crop yield reductions is to apply water in excess of plant requirements so as to leach the salts out of the root zone. (Letey and Dinar, 1986).

The Effect of Salt on Radish Seed Growth along the Nelson River in Ensi county, Indiana.

(Unknown, 2016) Each plant has its own tolerance levels towards salt. Salt water can also have a negative impact on plant growth if too much salt is absorbed by the plant. At lower salinity levels, the effects are not always apparent, but they still exist. Salt reduces a plant's ability to absorb water and it interferes with the nutrients availability in soils. It can disrupt plant nutrition, growth, flower quality and quantity, stem length, leaf health. (Henson.J, 2012) When salt is dissolved in water, the sodium and chloride ions separate and can harm plants. Chloride ions are absorbed through the roots and then transported to the leaves, to which it is accumulated there, to toxic levels. Toxic levels are what cause the characteristic marginal leaf scorch. (University of Vermont Extension, unknown) If plants are in an environment with more salt then the optimum range they have they will

AP Environmental Science-Acid Rain Labs:  Students were tasked with growing plants then using various concentrations of acidic water to gather qualitative data on plant growth and development in the presence of various acidic water mixtures over the course of two weeks. They then compared the Range of Tolerance of the plants to the local pH of rainwater to determine the expected impact on plants on the local level, as well as in other parts of the world.

Table 1 shows that it took .2 ml of salt to change the Soil Salinity of 300 ml of soil from .3 mmhos/cm to 1 mmhos/cm. From 1 mmhos/cm it took .3 ml of NaCl to increase the Soil Salinity to 2 mmhos/cm.From 2 mmhos/cm it took .3 ml of NaCl to increase the Soil Salinity to 3 mmhos/cm. Graph 1 corresponds to Table 1, displaying the increase in Soil Salinity for amount of NaCl added. This data was collected to know how much salt to add for the main part of experiment. The data in Table 1 and Graph 1 was taken without the consideration of significant figures.

Therefore, Western Australia must learn from the past as the predicted spread of secondary salinity is estimated to reach 8.8 million hectares by 2050 (Parliament of Australia, 2004). Therefore this report concludes that solving the salinity crisis can only be achieved by restoring balance to the groundwater table. Based on the evidence provided in this report, rebalancing the groundwater table is achievable by repurposing unproductive farming land by introducing saline agronomy; which includes planting salt tolerant crops such as tall wheat grass, and saltbush, as well as inventive industries that can use saline ground water from pumping (Parliament of Australia,

Plant water stress is a major factor affecting crop yield. With the ever-increasing human population, there is a constant stress exerted on water resources (McGwire et al., 2000). So irrigation to avoid or relieve this stress must be done judiciously, not only to avoid environmental problems such as groundwater pollution and runoff, but also to keep the cost down on a limited and expensive resource. Soil moisture sensors are often used for precision irrigation control purposes. However, soil moisture sensors can only assess the degree of water deficit stress that is imposed to the plants, but not necessarily the level of water deficit stress that is actually experienced by the plants (Sinclair and Ludlow, 1985). An assessment of leaf water content, on the other hand, may yield more detailed insight into the plant’s actual physiological response to a certain degree of low soil moisture content, and how water deficit stress is in fact experienced by the plant. Leaf water content is a key indicator of plant health, vigor and photosynthetic efficiency (Harry, 2006). Accurate retrieval of plant water content plays a crucial role in assessing drought risk (Bauer et al., 1986), select genotypes in breeding for water stress (Munjal and Dhanda, 2005), predicting wildfire and monitoring the physiological condition of vegetation (Peñuelas and Filella, 1998) and biomass (Cho et al., 2007; Mutanga et al., 2005; Ullah et al., 2012c), while in the agriculture domain it helps in scheduling

Some plants alter the architecture of their root systems under P stress conditions to optimize P acquisition (Richardson et al., 2011). Due to the relative immobility of P in the soil, with the highest concentrations usually found in the topsoil and little movement of P into the lower soil profiles adaptations that enhance acquisition of P from the topsoil are important (Vance et al., 2003).

The earth’s surface is made up of 72% of its water mass being of specifically high salinity (Flowers and Colmer, 2014). Something else to consider is that 7-10% of land is affected by levels of high salinity, mainly as a result of our impact on poor irrigation. (Grigore et al., 2014; Munns 2005, referenced in Joshi et al., 2015; Bromham, 2014). This information might be able to inspire us to find out how these plants can potentially be of great assistance to us in the