Straw returning to the field alleviates drought stress in maize by enhancing radiation use efficiency to promote agronomic character and dry matter accumulation
Drought stress (DS) severely affects maize yield and threatens food security. It has become an urgent matter to adopt corresponding cultivation and farming measures to conserve water and explore drought-tolerant measures for plants. Therefore, our goal is to investigate the effects of conservation t...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2025-10-01
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| Series: | Journal of Agriculture and Food Research |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154325006143 |
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| Summary: | Drought stress (DS) severely affects maize yield and threatens food security. It has become an urgent matter to adopt corresponding cultivation and farming measures to conserve water and explore drought-tolerant measures for plants. Therefore, our goal is to investigate the effects of conservation tillage measures and drought stress on the photosynthetic capacity of maize, as well as the responses of maize agronomic traits, dry matter accumulation to these. To achieve this objective, we set up two water management modes, drought stress (DS) and normal irrigation (NI), for six different varieties of maize under two tillage practices, the straw returning to the field (STR) and traditional plowing (TP, without straw). We compared the phenotypic traits, photosynthesis-related indexes and dry matter accumulation these different varieties of maize under various cultivation and tillage conditions. The main findings of this study are as follows: drought stress (DS) inhibited the growth and development of various maize cultivars, reduced maize plant height, ear position height and leaf area index. Additionally, it decreased the chlorophyll content within plant cells, which played a critical role in photosynthesis. This reduction subsequently impacted a series of internal energy transformation processes associated with light energy conversion, as reflected by changes in chlorophyll fluorescence parameters. Alterations in gas exchange parameters of maize leaves provided direct evidence of the physiological responses during photosynthesis under drought conditions. The adverse effects of drought on photosynthesis ultimately manifested as a decline in photosynthetic products. Specifically, drought stress reduced maize dry matter accumulation by 9.91 %–13.89 %, whereas straw returning to the field (STR) increased it by 3.93 %–5.48 %. |
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| ISSN: | 2666-1543 |