ABSTRACT
Increasing salinization has significant and detrimental impacts on land, water and vegetation quality, wildlife environments, agronomy and ecosystem functioning. This is particularly true for arid and semi-arid areas where high evapo-transpiration rates expose plants to further adaptive pressure. Unlike conventional crops, halophytes are plants that survive and are able to reproduce in environments of coasts, wetlands and inland deserts where salt concentration reaches or even exceeds seawater salinity level. Taking into account an increasing pressure on fresh water resources and considerable diversity of potentially useful halophytes, such an approach may lead to mid- and long-term rehabilitation of these marginal zones and creation of sustainable production systems. If applied successfully, such an approach may lead to domestication of wild, salt-tolerant plants to be used as energy, food, forage, oilseed crops, as well as pharmaceutical or ornamental plants. The renewable energy sources offer better prospects as these are unlimited, pollution free and cheap. Renewable energy sources can play an important role in the long term as oil substitute in the electric sector but in the short term their prospects are very limited because of cost and availability of the amounts required. Growing plants which can withstand harsh conditions of drought, salinity and desert in wastelands and produce higher amount of biomass offer bright future for bioremediation of saline and drought prone soils of arid and semi-arid regions of the world. This mini review is a summary of our efforts and review of the current literatures.
