Focus on agricultural biotechnology: Prospective for bio-watersaving theories and their applications in the semi-arid and arid areas

Abstract

Drought and water shortage have become a world-wide problem in recent years with the effect of global warming. Water-saving agriculture has become an inevitable direction of agronomical research, it has
been developed from practices through agronomic water saving to engineering water saving and to the approaches in biological water-saving. The essence of biological water-saving should be the highefficient use of water through biological ways, namely the “utilization and exploitation of physiological and genetic potentials of organisms so as to acquire more agricultural output and better economic and ecological benefits by utilizing smaller or same amounts of water or poor quality water”. As a systematic approach, biological water-saving should not only be applied with priority in crop
production, but also in other aspects of agriculture and industries such as husbandry, aquaculture, landscaping, sewage water management, water and soil environmental conservations. Therefore, biological water-saving represents the human effort in the construction of a resource-saving and environmental-friendly society.