This book addresses the most innovative topics on silicon to ensure sustainability in agriculture, including advances in nanotechnology and the impact on human health. It provides innovative information on the mineral nutrition of plants with a focus on the beneficial element silicon that has attracted the attention and interest of researchers. This is happening because silicon is the only element in plant nutrition that is capable of mitigating the greatest number of stressful events during plant cultivation. Faced with climate change associated with disease pressure due to the use of transgenic cultivars that decreases genetic variability and increases the occurrence of stress in crops. Associated with this, there is a need to reduce the use of chemical pesticides in crops to favor agro-environmental sustainability and thus increases the need for the use of silicon in agriculture. This is important because the main goal of plant mineral nutrition is to meet the demand of the plant and consequently of man and his nutritional requirements, but there is a lack of work to integrate the benefits of Si in plants and consequently its reflections on human health. The information in this work will drive further research to expand knowledge and the benefits of Si in sustainable agriculture and human health, and therefore, the target audience would be researchers, professors, students from universities and research institutes, as well as company technicians.
Renato de Mello Prado, holds a PhD in Agronomy from São Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil and did his post-doctorate in Plant Nutrition at Universidad Córdoba, Spain and at Universidad Pública de Navarra, Spain. He is currently Professor at UNESP in Undergraduate and Graduate Studies (Plant Production / Soil Science), CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazil) researcher and collaborator in other national and international universities. Supervised and co-supervised more than one hundred master's and doctoral students and more than thirty post-doctors. He has experience in plant nutrition, working in the teaching of the discipline and in the coordination of the Study Group on Plant Nutrition at Unesp (Genplant), which addresses the topics: studies of nutritional disorders, nutrient mobility, leaf nutrition, nutritional efficiency, silicon, leaf diagnosis and nutrition of different cultures. Published more than five hundred scientific articles in indexed journals.
Hassan Etesami is an Associate Professor at University of Tehran, Iran. He received a PhD degree in Soil Biology and Biotechnology from University of Tehran, Iran and he has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, according to Scopus database. His research area are microbial ecology, plant-microbe interactions, biofertilizers, integrated management of abiotic stresses, and bioremediation. Dr. Etesami is exploring the mechanisms by which microorganisms (bacteria and fungi) (and their interaction with silicon and biochar) can improve plant tolerance to various environmental stresses mainly salinity, drought and heavy metal stress.
A.K. Srivastava received his M.Sc.(Ag) and Ph.D in Soil Science from Banaras Hindu University, and is currently a Principal Scientist (Soil Science) at ICAR-Central Citrus Research Institute. He has extensively pursued research work on different aspects of citrus nutrition like nutrient constraints analysis of citrus orchards by developing DRIS-based soil-plant nutrient diagnostics, orchard efficiency modeling, targeted yield-based site specific nutrient management exploiting spatial variability in soil fertility, citrus rhizosphere specific microbial consortium and soil carbon loading, INM module, fertigation scheduling, nutrient mapping using geospatial tools, nutrient dynamic studies, transformation of soil microbial biomass nutrients within citrus rhizosphere and soil fertility map as decision support tool for fertilizer recommendation.
