Augmenting Crop Productivity in Stress Environment

The book inculcates a holistic approach to improve crop productivity and quality for ensuring food security and nutrition to all. This warrants to identify various stress conditions prevalent globally and tailor crop adaptability and productivity to the maximum accordingly, employing physio-molecular modern tools and techniques with judicious amalgamation with conventional crop husbandry. As a result, the book chapters encompass diverse environmental factors, internal physio-molecular processes and their modulations with a final goal of expanding area under cultivation by utilization of constraint terrains of poor site quality and augmenting sustainable crop productivity and quality on the face of rapidly changing climate. The book includes role of plant hormones, nano-sensors, nanomaterials etc. in stress tolerance responses, capturing recent advancement in the field of stress tolerance, enlarging scope of coverage by gleaning modern literature and providing glimpses of futuristic scenario of agriculture practices that can render ‘balance staple food rich in nutrition, vitamins and minerals’ to teeming billions of global human populations. Thus, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the role of stress environment and understanding stress physiology for developing stress tolerant crops. The book covers current knowledge and future prospects to achieve enhanced food security under stress environment of crops. The renowned contributors elegantly crafted each chapter, suited alike to both classroom texts for graduate students and reference material for researchers. The language and style are simple and lucid with liberal use of illustrations. This book should be on the shelf of university/ personal libraries for inquisitive students and enlightened researchers.

Dr. Shamim Akhtar Ansari, Scientist G & Ex-Director, Institute of Forest Productivity, Ranchi, India is an erudite academician and researcher. With an experience of > 38 years, Dr. Ansari possesses expertise in Crop/ Tree Physiology, Biotechnology and Forest Population Genetics. He served as Assistant Editor of "TFRI Newsletter" (1997-2002) and Editor "Indian Journal of Tropical Biodiversity" (2002-2012). To his credit are >100 research publications and eleven students for doctorate program. Dr. Ansari’s notable achievements include University Gold Medal (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh) and R.D. Asana Gold Medal. He is also IBS/ISPP fellow and FLS (London).

 Dr. Mohammad Israil Ansari, Department of Botany, University of Lucknow, India, specializes in Plant Stress Physiology, Molecular Biology, Nanotechnology, Post-harvest and Agricultural Biotechnology and has worked as Professor of Biotechnology at Amity University, Lucknow, India. Dr. Ansari is a Fellow of Academia Sinica with post-doctoral work from Institute of Botany, Graduate Institute of Plant Biology, National Taiwan University and Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, Taiwan. The academic experience of 29 years has enriched him with 109 research publications, Post-doctoral, Ph.D., post-graduate summer projects and editorial board membership, international reviewer-ship and membership to several Academic /Research and Development bodies.

 Dr. Azamal Husen served as Professor & Head, Department of Biology, University of Gondar, Ethiopia and is a Foreign Delegate at Wolaita Sodo University, Wolaita, Ethiopia. Dr Husen’s research and teaching experience of 20 years includes nanomaterial synthesis and their various application, crop/tree physiology, herbal medicine, clonal propagation and improvement of tree species. Dr. Husen contributed to R&D projects of World Bank, ICAR, ICFRE, JBIC etc. To his credit are >150 publications; and he is Editor-in-Chief of the ‘American Journal of Plant Physiology’; and a Series Editor of ‘Exploring Medicinal Plants’, published by Taylor & Francis Group, USA.