Abiotic Stress - in Plants

In Plants

A plant’s first line of defense against abiotic stress is in its roots. If the soil holding the plant is healthy and biologically diverse, the plant will have a higher chance of surviving stressful conditions.

Facilitation, or the positive interactions between different species of plants, is an intricate web of association in a natural environment. It is how plants work together. In areas of high stress, the level of facilitation is especially high as well. This could possibly be because the plants need a stronger network to survive in a harsher environment, so their interactions between species, such as cross-pollination or mutualistic actions, become more common to cope with the severity of their habitat. This facilitation will not go so far as to protect an entire species, however. For example, cold weather crops like rye, oats, wheat, and apples are expected to decline by about 15% in the next fifty years and strawberries will drop as much as 32% simply because of projected climate changes of a few degrees. Plants are extremely sensitive to such changes, and do not generally adapt quickly.

Plants also adapt very differently from one another, even from a plant living in the same area. When a group of different plant species was prompted by a variety of different stress signals, such as drought or cold, each plant responded uniquely. Hardly any of the responses were similar, even though the plants had become accustomed to exactly the same home environment. Rice (Oryza sativa) is a classic example. Rice is a staple food throughout the world, especially in China and India. Nowadays, due to climate change, rice plants experience different types of abiotic stresses, like drought and high salinity. These stress conditions have a negative impact on rice production. Genetic diversity has been studied among several rice varieties with different genotypes using molecular markers.