Sustainability of crop production from polluted lands

Sustainable food production for a rapidly growing global population is a major challenge of this century. In order to meet the demand for food production, an additional land area of 2.7 to 4.9 Mha year -1 will be required for agriculture. However, one third of arable lands are already contaminated, therefore the use of polluted lands will have to feature highly in modern agriculture. The use of such lands comes however with additional challenges and suitable agrotechnological interventions are essential for ensuring the safety and sustainability of relevant production system. There are also other issues to consider such as, cost benefit analysis, the possible entry of pollutants into to the phytoproducts, certification and marketing of such products, in order to achieve a the large scale exploitation of polluted land

Performance Analysis and Soil Quality Indexing for <i>Dalbergia sissoo</i> Roxb. Grown in Marginal and Degraded Land of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India

The successful utilization of marginal and degraded lands for biomass and bioenergy production depends upon various factors such as climatic conditions, the adaptive traits of the tree species and their growth rate and respective belowground responses. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the growth performance of a bioenergy tree (Dalbergia sissoo Roxb.) grown in marginal and degraded land of the Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh, India and to analyze the effect of D. sissoo plantations on soil quality improvement over the study years. For this, a soil quality index (SQI) was developed based on principal component analysis (PCA) to understand the effect of D. sissoo plantations on belowground responses. PCA results showed that among the studied soil variables, bulk density (BD), moisture content (MC), microbial biomass carbon (MBC) and soil urease activity (SUA) are the key variables critically influencing the growth of D. sissoo. The SQI was found in an increasing order with the growth period of D. sissoo. (i.e., from 0.419 during the first year to 0.579 in the fourth year). A strong correlation was also observed between the growth attributes (diameter at breast height, R2 = 0.870; and plant height, R2 = 0.861) and the soil quality (p &lt; 0.01). Therefore, the developed SQI can be used as key indicator for monitoring the restoration potential of D. sissoo growing in marginal and degraded lands and also for adopting suitable interventions to further improve soil quality for multipurpose land restoration programs, thereby attaining land degradation neutrality and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainability Analysis of Prosopis juliflora (Sw.) DC Based Restoration of Degraded Land in North India

Restoration of marginal and degraded lands is essential for regaining biodiversity and ecosystems services, and thereby attaining UN-Sustainable Development Goals. During the last few decades, many fast growing and hardy trees have been introduced worldwide to restore the marginal and degraded lands for ecosystem stability. Unfortunately, most of these introduced species have become invasive and invaded the nearby productive systems, leading to significant biodiversity loss and land degradation. Therefore, it is imperative to conduct a sustainability analysis of the introduced species for necessary course correction and also for preventing the future utilisation of such species for land restoration. With this backdrop, the present study was conducted to analyse the socio-ecological impacts of a widely used species, i.e., Prosopis juliflora (Sw.) DC based restoration of degraded land of Lucknow, North India. For this, ecological (soil quality and plant biodiversity) and social (livelihood) indicators have been studied over a period of two years (2015&ndash;16) through direct field sampling and questionnaire-based surveys. While there was a positive difference (p &lt; 0.01) in the key physico-chemical properties of the P. juliflora-invaded soil than the non-invaded site, the belowground microbial load was significantly lower (19.46 &times; 106 g&minus;1 of soil) in invaded land as compared to the non-invaded one (31.01 &times; 106 g&minus;1). Additionally, the invasion of P. juliflora had significantly reduced the biodiversity by displacing the local flora such as Achyranthes aspera L., Amaranthus spinosus L., Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers, Euphorbia hirta L., etc. The invaded area had only eight plant species having an effective number of species (ENS) of 7.2, whereas the non-invaded area had the presence of 26 plant species with an ENS of 23.8. Although the local people utilised P. juliflora as fuelwood mostly during summer and winter seasons, the invasion resulted in a fodder deficit of 419.97 kg household&minus;1 y&minus;1 leading to resource scarcity in the invaded area in comparison to the non-invaded area. Ecodistribution mapping clearly showed that P. juliflora is already found in most of the tropical and subtropical countries (~103) including in India and has become invasive in many countries. Therefore, we recommend that P. juliflora must be wisely used for the land restoration programs targeted during the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021&ndash;2030) as this species has invasive traits and thereby reduces the ecosystem sustainability of the invaded areas