Advances in Plant Phenotyping for Enhanced Salt Tolerance

Abstract

Salinity stress is one of the most severe abiotic restrictions on crop productivity around the world. It is fundamentally caused by the accumulation of sodium, which may be natural as a result of geological and meteorological processes or caused as a result of human activities. Salt stress has a substantial impact on plant development and growth from the seed germination stage to maturity and, in extreme cases, may lead to plant death. Crop plants have evolved with various morphological and physiological characteristics that allow them to cope with and ameliorate the effects of salinity stress. The variability observed in these traits in response to salinity stress paved the way for breeding-based crop improvement strategies. However, phenotyping of plants’ observable characteristics is a major constraint among others to efficient breeding programmes. This chapter explicates the technological advances in precision phenotyping of germplasm, and the strategies for integrating high-throughput phenotyping with genetic studies for enhanced salt tolerance in crops are discussed.