Use of Bacterial Strains to Improve Soil Productivity Under Salt Stress

Abstract

Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, metal stress, etc. negatively affects the growth and yield of crops. Therefore, this requires an improved and imperative strategy, i.e., mitigating the adverse environmental conditions, improving per unit productivity, and reducing cost of production of crops. The salinity in the soil may be because of the high concentration of Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, and Cl⁻ salts, may be coming from weathering minerals, through irrigation water/fertilizers, and sometimes may migrate upward in the soil from shallow groundwater through evaporation. The use of biological products based on plant growth-promoting bacterial inoculants in agriculture offers an environmentally sustainable approach for maintaining the healthy yield of crops in saline habitat. Various traits of benign bacterial pool have been reported on amelioration of salinity stress, e.g., ACC-deaminase, exopolysaccharide, volatile production, Pi solubilization, and IAA production. In the present chapter, we are dealing with deployment of benign microbes in alleviation of salinity to ameliorate soil and plant productivity.