article · Soil Systems
Soil salinity presents a critical threat to agriculture worldwide, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. Excessive salt in soils harms crucial chemical and physical soil processes and suppresses microbial activity, undermining overall soil health, fertility, and productivity. In cultivated crops, salinity causes osmotic stress and inflicts damage across physiological, biochemical, and genetic levels. Crops demonstrate varying degrees of tolerance, ranging from sensitive varieties such as carrots and strawberries, to moderately tolerant crops like wheat, and hardy species such as barley and date palms. Addressing this challenge requires an interdisciplinary understanding linking soil biogeochemistry, microbiology, and plant nutrition. Mitigation strategies evaluated include targeted nutrient additions, microbial inoculations, organic amendments, physicochemical interventions, biological techniques, and emerging nano-management methods.
Rising soil salinity directly reduces the amount of fertile land available for food production, especially in dry climates. Understanding how salinity damages crops and soil ecosystems allows researchers and farming communities to deploy targeted solutions. Combining biological treatments, soil amendments, and novel technologies offers a practical path toward restoring degraded agricultural land and safeguarding global crop supplies.
The findings point to opportunities for agricultural biotechnology firms and fertiliser manufacturers to develop commercial soil treatments, such as specialised microbial inoculants, organic soil conditioners, and nano-management formulations. Potential end users include commercial growers and agricultural extension services managing salt-affected land. Because the text presents a broad review of mitigation options and identifies ongoing research gaps, the commercial readiness varies widely, with traditional amendments being applied, while nano-management approaches remain in earlier stages of development.
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Soil salinity is a serious problem facing many countries globally, especially those with semi-arid and arid climates. Soil salinity can have negative influences on soil microbial activity as well as many chemical and physical soil processes, all of which are crucial for soil health, fertility, and productivity. Soil salinity can negatively affect physiological, biochemical, and genetic attributes of cultivated plants as well. Plants have a wide variety of responses to salinity stress and are classified as sensitive (e.g., carrot and strawberry), moderately sensitive (grapevine), moderately tolerant (wheat) and tolerant (barley and date palm) to soil salinity depending on the salt content required to cause crop production problems. Salinity mitigation represents a critical global agricultural issue. This review highlights the properties and classification of salt-affected soils, plant damage from osmotic stress due to soil salinity, possible approaches for soil salinity mitigation (i.e., applied nutrients, microbial inoculations, organic amendments, physio-chemical approaches, biological approaches, and nano-management), and research gaps that are important for the future of food security. The strong relationship between soil salinity and different soil subdisciplines (mainly, soil biogeochemistry, soil microbiology, soil fertility and plant nutrition) are also discussed.
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DOI: 10.3390/soilsystems8010011
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