📄 Original Paper on Google Drive
(Some edits have been made to balance text and visual elements for modern readers.)
Ariel Chamberlain
Environmental Studies, Southern New Hampshire University
Environmental Research Methods: ENV-250
Professor Piscopo
2023, April 16
<aside> 🔍 Overview
Climate change brings with it growing agricultural challenges, like increased drought, salinity, and disease, and feeding a rapidly growing global population that is expected to reach 9 billion soon will compound these agricultural challenges with an increasing demand for food (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, n.d.; Population Education, n.d.). This review explores whether inoculating crops with targeted, beneficial, endophytic fungi could be an organic and sustainable way to increase crop resilience to climate change driven stressors and increase overall crop yields, without the unsustainable ecological impacts and negative human health consequences created by using chemical solutions (Kamran et al., 2022; Li et al., 2023; Pandey et al., 2022).
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Climate change coupled with a rapidly growing human population, will bring a variety of increasing agricultural challenges, like drought, disease, and saltwater intrusion, and current agrochemical methods to protect against disease and increase crop yields are having negative effects on our environment and human health (Kamran et al., 2022). So, there is a growing need to develop creative, environmentally sustainable ways to increase crop yield and resilience to stressors. In nature, endophytic fungi and plants have co-evolved and developed symbiotic relationships that can increase plant resilience to both pathogens and abiotic stressors, and these fungi can even play an important role in host plant metabolic regulation of nutrients, phosphorous, and nitrogen (Kamran et al., 2022; Li et al., 2023; Pandey et al., 2022). This review covers four unique experiments where agricultural crop plants were inoculated with targeted endophytic fungi and then tested in a variety of environmental conditions, including drought, salinity, and disease. Test results were then analyzed relative to controls, and variety of benefits to inoculating crops with endophytic fungi were found, including resilience to salt and drought, antimicrobial protections, and increased crop yield. Under increased stress the benefits of endophytic fungus inoculation tended to increase as well. However, specific endophytic fungi have different effects on each plant, and a coordinated effort to catalog these relationships may be needed. Additional research, especially into human and ecological safety and experiments performed under farm conditions, will also be needed before large-scale agricultural adoption.
With a growing global population expected to reach nine billion before 2040, food supplies will need to be increased to feed everyone (Population Education, n.d.). Additionally, climate change brings with it increased threats of drought from changing weather patterns and increased heat, as well as salt-water intrusion from rising sea levels. Unfortunately, human activities like agricultural tilling, construction, and deforestation have been degrading global soils at a rate much faster than the rate at which arable soil can be generated, and an estimated 33% of Earth’s arable soils are already degraded, with over 90% soil degradation expected by 2050 (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, n.d.). The culmination of these combined factors indicates that more food will need to be grown in increasingly less favorable conditions in the near future.