Abstract
Water shortage and salinity are major challenges for sustaining global food security. Using nutrients in the nano-scale formulation including zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NP) is a novel fertilization strategy for crops. In this study, two field-based trials were conducted during 2018 and 2019 to examine the influence of three ZnO NP concentrations (0, 50, and 100 ppm) in eggplant grown under full irrigation (100 of crop evapotranspiration; ETc) and drought stress (60% of ETc). Plant growth, yield, water productivity (WP), physiology, biochemistry, and anatomy responses were evaluated. Drought stress significantly decreased membrane stability index (MSI), relative water content (RWC), and photosynthetic efficiency, thus hampered eggplant growth and yield. In contrast, exogenous ZnO NP to water-stressed eggplant resulted in increased RWC and MSI associated with improved stem and leaf anatomical structures and enhanced photosynthetic efficiency. Under drought stress, supplementation of 50 and 100 ppm ZnO NP improved growth characteristics and increased fruit yield by 12.2% and 22.6%, respectively, compared with fully irrigated plants and nonapplied ZnO NP. The highest water productivity (WP) was obtained when eggplant was irrigated with 60% ETc and foliarly treated with 50 or 100 ppm of ZnO NP, which led to 50.8–66.1% increases in WP when compared with nontreated fully irrigated plants. Collectively, these findings demonstrated that foliar spraying ZnO NP gives the utility for alleviating drought stress effects on eggplant cultivated in saline soil.
Highlights
Sustainable agricultural development depends on the type and supply of irrigation water worldwide, given that agriculture consumes approximately 69% of the total freshwater [1]
Eggplant growth in terms of plant height, number of leaves per plant, stem diameter, fresh and dry weights of plant shoot, and total plant leaf area were significantly impacted by zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NP) foliar application under deficit irrigation (DI) stress (Table 5)
These growth traits significantly increased by foliar application of ZnO NP and these improvements were more pronounced under ZnO NP(100)
Summary
Sustainable agricultural development depends on the type and supply of irrigation water worldwide, given that agriculture consumes approximately 69% of the total freshwater [1]. The increasing population growth leads to an increase in the demand for food, which increases the irrigated area, which has increased eight-fold over the past century [3,4,5]. These restrictions and risks to food security will be massive, with the expected climate change, causing increased competition for water resources between different sectors [6,7]. Effective innovations in irrigation and management techniques are needed to achieve more efficient and logical use of water [8,9,10,11,12]. Deficit irrigation (DI) is used as a practice to save water by adding less water than the irrigation water requirement [3,13]
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