Technological and Biotechnological Strategies Applied to Drought-Resilient Vegetable Production

Plants make life possible because they produce oxygen during photosynthesis while they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they provide essential nutrients for human and animal consumption which serve as raw materials for various industrial products. The declining water resources that affect agricultural regions now restrict farmers from growing crops in those specific areas. The book focuses on two main topics which include drought-related vegetable production and technological and biotechnological methods developed to accomplish this critical objective. The first chapter presents the fundamentals of vegetable production. The second chapter examines the effects of drought on vegetable crop growth, yield, and product quality, as well as the procedures used to mitigate these effects, through the implementation of advanced water management techniques, biostimulant applications, and breeding methods that focus on developing more resilient plant varieties. The third chapter addresses the use of biotechnological approaches such as micropropagation and somatic embryogenesis as tools for propagation and in vitro studies of drought stress, transgenesis and the study of genes involved in tolerance, and research on the role of secondary metabolites in defense responses to drought stress in vegetable crops. The fourth chapter explains drought-related crop protection mechanisms which fungi and bacteria use to safeguard vegetable crops from drought damage. The research results presented here help to create better methods for using drought-affected regions to grow vegetables under challenging climatic conditions.