Microbial services in agro-environmental management

Abstract

Today global food security holds utmost importance so as to match the rate of increasingly urbanization and growing population, simultaneously increasing new food production strategies for developing countries by following environmentally sustainable approaches. To achieve better crop yield, farmers are extensively applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which unwillingly leads to environmental perturbation. The amendment of chemical fertilizers resulted in acidification of soil and eutrophication of aquatic habitats, and it also supports emission of CH4. Microbial biofertilizers is a suitable and eco-friendly alternative to chemical fertilizer to achieve high crop production. Microbes from the rhizosphere are known to fix atmospheric nitrogen, releasing plant growth promoters, solubilizing and promoting uptake of essential metals responsible for better plant growth, and hence increasing crop yield. Rice is one of the most important staple foods in Asian countries. Rice cropping systems are the major anthropogenic sources of CH4 emission. The amendment of biochar to paddy field can mitigate CH4 emission and improves soil fertility by rising water holding and nutrient retention capacity of soil. The utilization of pesticide has as its main positive aspects the reduction of vector-borne diseases and increased crop production. But, only a smaller part of total pesticides are applied in the field to target pests and the residuals are distributed throughout the environment, which impinges on the nontarget organisms. Thus degradation of such residual pesticides from the environment is required to protect nontarget organisms. In this perspective, application of nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria to degrade residual pesticides is an eco-friendly and imperative approach. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.