IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jagris/v7y2017i11p90-d116786.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Interactive Effects of N-, P- and K-Nutrition and Drought Stress on the Development of Maize Seedlings

Author

Listed:
  • Christoph Studer

    (Department of Plant Science, Technical University of Munich, Freising D-85354, Germany
    Swiss College of Agriculture, Zollikofen CH-3052, Switzerland)

  • Yuncai Hu

    (Department of Plant Science, Technical University of Munich, Freising D-85354, Germany)

  • Urs Schmidhalter

    (Department of Plant Science, Technical University of Munich, Freising D-85354, Germany)

Abstract

Global climate change is likely to increase the risk of frequent drought. Maize, as the principal global cereal, is particularly impacted by drought. Nutrient supply may improve plant drought tolerance for better plant establishment during seedling growth stages. Thus, this study investigated the interactive effects of drought and the application of the nutrients N, P and K either individually or in combination. The maize seedlings were harvested between 12 and 20 days after sowing, and the leaf area, shoot fresh and dry weight and root dry weight were determined, and shoot water content and root/shoot dry weight ratio were calculated. Among the N, P and K fertilization treatments applied individually or in combination, the results showed that there was generally a positive effect of combined NPK and/or NP nutrient supply on shoot growth such as leaf area, shoot fresh and dry weight at day 20 after sowing under both well-watered and drought conditions compared with no nutrient supply. Compared with the effect of N and P nutrient supply, it seems that K was not limiting to plant growth due to the mineralogical characteristics of the illitic-chloritic silt loam used, which provided sufficient K, even though soil tests showed a low K nutrient status. Interestingly, the root/shoot ratio remained high and constant under drought regardless of NPK application, while it decreased with NPK applications in the well-watered treatment. This suggests that the higher root/shoot ratios with N, NP, PK and NPK under drought could be exploited as a strategy for stress tolerance in crop plants.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Studer & Yuncai Hu & Urs Schmidhalter, 2017. "Interactive Effects of N-, P- and K-Nutrition and Drought Stress on the Development of Maize Seedlings," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 7(11), pages 1-12, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jagris:v:7:y:2017:i:11:p:90-:d:116786
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/7/11/90/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/7/11/90/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Urs Feller & Stanislav Kopriva & Valya Vassileva, 2018. "Plant Nutrient Dynamics in Stressful Environments: Needs Interfere with Burdens," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 8(7), pages 1-6, July.
    2. Temesgen Assefa Gelaw & Kavita Goswami & Neeti Sanan-Mishra, 2023. "Individual and Interactive Effects of Nitrogen and Phosphorus on Drought Stress Response and Recovery in Maize Seedlings," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-33, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jagris:v:7:y:2017:i:11:p:90-:d:116786. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.