Full Length Research Paper

Focus on agricultural biotechnology: Prospective for bio-watersaving theories and their applications in the semi-arid and arid areas

Zhengbin Zhang¹*, Hongbo Shao^2,3,4,*, Ping Xu¹, Mengyun Hu¹, Weiyi Song⁵ and Xiaojun Hu¹

¹Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang 050021, China.

²State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Science and Ministry of Water Resources, Yangling 712100, China.

³Binzhou University, Binzhou 256603, China.

⁴Institute of Life Sciences, Qingdao University of Science and Technology Zhengzhou Road 53, Qingdao 266042, China.

⁵Department of Life Science, Shangqiu Normal University, Shangqiu, 476000, China.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: zzb@sjziam.ac.cn or shaohongbochu@126.com.

Accepted 6 April, 2009

Drought and water shortage have become a world-wide problem in recent years with the effect of global warming. Water-saving agriculture has become an inevitable direction of agronomical research, it has been developed from practices through agronomic water saving to engineering water saving and to the approaches in biological water-saving. The essence of biological water-saving should be the high-efficient use of water through biological ways, namely the “utilization and exploitation of physiological and genetic potentials of organisms so as to acquire more agricultural output and better economic and ecological benefits by utilizing smaller or same amounts of water or poor quality water”. As a systematic approach, biological water-saving should not only be applied with priority in crop production, but also in other aspects of agriculture and industries such as husbandry, aquaculture, landscaping, sewage water management, water and soil environmental conservations. Therefore, biological water-saving represents the human effort in the construction of a resource-saving and environmental-friendly society.    

Key words: Outlook, application, bio-water-saving, water use efficiency (WUE), drought, crop production, sustainable agriculture.