Restoration of Degraded Lands Introduction, Salinity, Urbanization, Cultivation, Restoration, Rhizobium, Nitrogen Fixing

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Restoration of Degraded Lands
Restoration of Degraded Lands Introduction
Reforesatation Through Micropropagation
Casuarina for Tropical Reforestation on Adverse Sites
Development of Strees Tolerant Plants
Use of Mycorrhizae in Reforestation

Restoration of Degraded Lands Introduction
Increased human activity has affected the different ecosystems in a variety of different ways. One of these effects involves degradation of habitats, including cultivated land. Land areas accounting for about 50 per cent of arable land in the world are arid with problems of salinity, acidity or aluminium toxicity. An area of 400 million hectares suffer with salinity alone. In India also 50% of the land is facing degradation due to a variety of factors including (i) wind and coastal erosion, (ii) water logging and (iii) salinity.

Restoration of these degraded lands, therefore, is a major concern both in the developing and developed countries. This is also essential' due to rapid urbanization leading to decreasing area of available land for cultivation in rural areas. For instance; during the last 50 years (1951-2001), per capita availability of land decreased from 0.9 hectare to 0.3 hectare.

The available conventional methods of reconstruction of degraded lands are relatively inefficient. With the advent of biotechnology, however, unprecedented opportunities for recovery of degraded ecosystems, through the manipulation of biological systems, have become available. In this chapter, various methods involving plant biotechnology for restoration of degareed will be discussed. No attempt this chapter will be made to di cuss other conventional methods available for restoration of these degraded lands.

The plant biotechnological methods will include the following: (i) reforestation through micropropagation and use. of mycorrhizae; (ii) improvement of soil fertility through the use of nitrogen fixing bacteria, Rhizobium in association with leguminous trees and Frankia in association with non-leguminous species (also discussed earlier in Chapter 48); (iii) development of plants, tolerant to abiotic stress, so that they may be grown on degraded lands, and (iv) use of selected and engineered microbes and transgenic plants for removal and recovery of strategic and precious metals from contaminated degraded lands.