Abstract
Purpose
Crop sensitivity to root zone salinity can vary over time, which can lead to severe damage when high sensitivity coincides with high soil salinity. The variation in salinity sensitivity of sunflower during its growth cycle is unknown.
Methods
Two pot experiments were conducted in sand culture with a complete nutrient solution. Solutions were flushed through pots in excess to maintain specified salt concentrations in the soil solution. In Experiment 1, salt-sensitive stages were determined by applying solutions with an electrical conductivity of < 0.7, 2, 4 or 8 dS m− 1 through the vegetative, flowering or grain filling stages. In Experiment 2, the most sensitive stage to root-zone salinity was determined by exposing plants to 10-day periods of salinity (< 0.7, 8, 16 and 24 dS m− 1) overlapping by 4 days starting from 13-leaf to grain filling.
Results
In both experiments, decreases in seed yield were associated with exposure of plants to elevated EC during the period before opening of disk flower to ~ 95% anthesis, while grain filling was the least sensitive. The decline in yield was correlated with a decrease in mature seed number. Increasing salinity from 4 to 8 dS m− 1 during flowering increased the area without seeds at the centre of the disk. In experiment 2, measurements of leaf ion concentrations and photosynthesis suggested that Na+ toxicity decreased yield due to decreases in availability of photosynthate to flowers.
Conclusion
To maximise sunflower yield in saline soils, it is important to minimise salinity stress from before flower opening to anthesis.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The open location was selected to enable the cross-pollination of flowers by bees.
References
Aref F, Rad HE (2012) Physiological characterization of rice under salinity stress during vegetative and reproductive stages. Indian J Sci Technol 5:2578–2586. https://doi.org/10.17485/ijst/2012/v5i4.11
Astiz V, Hernández LF (2013) Pollen production in sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is affected by air temperature and relative humidity during early reproductive growth. Phyton 82:297–302. https://doi.org/10.32604/PHYTON.2013.82.297
Castillo E, Tuong TP, Trang HTT, Thu TNQ, Phuong TTK (2003) Phenological and physiological responses of a rice cultivar to level and timing of salinity stress. In: Preston N, Clayton H (ed) Rice–shrimp farming in the Mekong Delta: biophysical and socioeconomic issues. ACIAR Technical Reports No. 52e, Canberra, pp 89–101
Debaeke P, Casadebaig P, Flenet F, Langlade N (2017) Sunflower crop and climate change: vulnerability, adaptation, and mitigation potential from case-studies in Europe. OCL Oilseeds Fats Crops Lipids 24:D102. https://doi.org/10.1051/ocl/2016052
Dolferus R, Ji X, Richards RA (2011) Abiotic stress and control of grain number in cereals. Plant Sci 181:331–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2011.05.015
Granier C, Tardieu F (1998) Is thermal time adequate for expressing the effects of temperature on sunflower leaf development? Plant Cell Environ 21:695–703. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-3040.1998.00319.x
Ji X, Shiran B, Wan J, Lewis DC, Jenkins CLD, Condon AG, Richards RA, Dolferus R (2010) Importance of pre-anthesis anther sink strength for maintenance of grain number during reproductive stage water stress in wheat. Plant Cell Environ 33:926–942. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3040.2010.02130.x
Maas EV, Poss JA (1989a) Salt sensitivity of cowpea at various growth stages. Irrig Sci 10:313–320. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00257496
Maas EV, Poss JA (1989b) Salt sensitivity of wheat at various growth stages. Irrig Sci 10:29–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00266155
Maas EV, Poss JA, Hoffman GJ (1986) Salinity sensitivity of sorghum at three growth stages. Irrig Sci 7:1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00255690
Marc J, Palmer JH (1981) Photoperiodic sensitivity of inflorescence initiation and development in sunflower. Field Crops Res 4:155–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-4290(81)90065-4
Nguyen GN, Sutton BG (2009) Water Deficit reduced fertility of Young Microspores resulting in a decline of viable mature pollen and grain set in Rice. J Agron Crop Sci 195:11–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-037X.2008.00342.x
Nleya T, Sexton P, Gustafson K, Moriles Miller J (2013) Soybean growth stages. In: Clay DE, Carlson CG, Clay SA, Wagner L, Deneke D, Hay C (eds) IGrow soybean: Best Management Practices for soybean production. South Dakota State University, SDSU Extension, Brookings, SD, USA, pp 3–34
Parish RW, Phan HA, Iacuone S, Li SF (2012) Tapetal development and abiotic stress: a centre of vulnerability. Funct Plant Biol 39:553–559. https://doi.org/10.1071/FP12090
R Core Team R (2013) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. http://www.R-project.org/. Accessed 8 Aug 2023
Rao SS, Elangovan M, Umakanth AV, Seetharama N, Reddy BVS, Ramesh S, Kumar AA, Gowda CLL (2008) Characterizing phenology and growth stages of sorghum hybrids. In: Reddy Belum VS, Ramesh S, Ashok Kumar A, Gowda G (eds) Sorghum improvement in the new millenium. Patencheru, Andhra Pradesh, India, pp 16–22. https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.4841.8246
Saini HS (1997) Effects of water stress on male gametophyte development in plants. Sex Plant Reprod 10:67–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s004970050069
Saini HS, Sedgley M, Aspinall D (1984) Developmental anatomy in wheat of male sterility induced by heat stress, water deficit or abscisic acid. Aust J Plant Physiol 11:243–253. https://doi.org/10.1071/PP9840243
Schneiter AA, Miller JF (1981) Description of sunflower growth stages. Crop Sci 21:901–903. https://doi.org/10.2135/cropsci1981.0011183X002100060024x
Singh RK, Kota S, Flowers TJ (2021) Salt tolerance in rice: seedling and reproductive stage QTL mapping come of age. Theor Appl Genet 134:3495–3533. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-021-03890-3
Van Genuchten MT (1983) Analyzing crop salt tolerance data: model description and user’s manual. USDA, ARS, U.S. Salinity Lab. Research Report No. 120. U.S. Gov. Printing Office, Washington, DC
Wolf AV, Brown MG, Prentiss PG (1985) Concentrative properties of aqueous solutions. In: Weast RC (ed) Handbook of chemistry and physics. CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp D219–D271
Zadoks JC, Chang TT, Konzak CF (1974) A decimal code for the growth stages of cereals. Weed Res 14:415–421. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3180.1974.tb01084.x
Zeng L, Shannon MC, Lesch SM (2001) Timing of salinity stress affects rice growth and yield components. Agric Water Manag 48:191–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-3774(00)00146-3
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (Project LWR/2014/073) for financial support and for a John Allwright Fellowship to the principal author. We are thankful to Khulna University (Bangladesh) and Murdoch University (Western Australia) for their support in conducting these experiments. We are grateful for helpful comments on the manuscript from Dr Qifu Ma.
Funding
The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research provided project support for this work (Project LWR/2014/073) and a scholarship to the senior author.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Additional information
Responsible Editor: Ian Dodd.
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
ESM 1
(DOCX 11.2 mb)
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Mila, A.J., Bell, R.W., Barrett-Lennard, E.G. et al. Flowering is the critical growth stage for adverse effects of salinity on the grain yield of sunflower. Plant Soil 492, 285–299 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06169-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06169-2