Abiotic Stress Management in Fruit Crops: A Review

The current changes in fruit production scenario challenged the quality and quantity of fruits required for the vast population. The abiotic and biotic stresses, encountered at critical growth stages and adversely affect productivity of plants. The abiotic stresses like drought, extremes temperature floods and salinity have emerged as major challenges for production of crops. The different abiotic stressescause morphological, anatomical, physiological and biochemical changes and ultimately impacting the productivity and quality of plants. Timely intervention with appropriate adaptation strategies would help in realizing sustainable yields and further enable to overcome adverse effects of abiotic stresses. Successful cultivation of crops and attaining reasonable yields under abiotic stress situations mainly depends on the available adaptation options. Practices like modification in cultural practices, adopting novel irrigation, choice of tolerant rootstocks, choice of tolerant cultivars/crops and biotechnological approaches are to be implemented for alleviating adverse effects. Though, the productivity of fruit crops remains low in areas experiencing abiotic stresses. Therefore, focus is required for developing integrated location-specific and crop- specific adaptation strategies for various abiotic stresses. The integration of all available adaptation options would be the most effective approach in sustaining the production and productivity of fruit crops under abiotic stresses.