Advances in Crop Environment Interaction

Abstract

Agriculture is facing multifaceted threats from unpredictable weather variability, frequent drought occurrence, irrigation water scarcity, degradation of soil resources, and environmental health. These stresses result in modification of plant physiology to impart responses to the changing abiotic and biotic environments, only at the cost of decline in the ability of plant productivity. Given these facts, assessing the status of natural resource base and understanding the soil-plant-environmental interaction mechanisms for devising adaptation and mitigation approaches are of great and imminent challenges for all of us. In this context, it is essential to understand potential applications of modern tools and existing coping mechanisms and their integration to develop advanced mitigation strategies. In a broader perspective, the proposed book deals with crop environment interactions in the pretext of changing climatic conditions. This book tries to bring answers in four major theme areas such as the following: Understanding the mechanism of carbon dynamics in soil-plant-environmental continuum, greenhouse gas fluxes in agriculture systems, soil properties influenced by climate change, and carbon sequestration processes Mitigation and management of photothermal environment for improving crop productivity, soil health under variable climate, agro-ecosystem evapotranspiration losses through biophysical controls, and heat stress in field crops and its management Studying the impact of climate change on biotic environments, insect-pest interaction, manifestation of diseases, and adaptation strategies for island agroecosystem Innovative approaches for assessing stress impacts in crops such as crop modeling, remote sensing, and spectral stress indices. This book is a collection of contribution from the authoritative experts in their respective fields, provides a perspective to young researchers and opens up new avenues of work in the respective fields, and will be useful for different stakeholders, including postgraduate students and other academicians as well. vii We are extremely thankful to all the contributors for their efforts in providing comprehensive and coherent reviews. We are also thankful to Indian Ecological Society for providing language editing services. We sincerely appreciate Team Springer especially RaagaiPriya ChandraSekaran and Aakanksha Tyagi for providing technical support in this publication.