Functional Biostimulants: A Toolbox for Securing Yield Stability and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

Ensuring yield stability and sustainability of horticultural and agronomic crops presents a significant challenge to humanity. Recently, natural substances and/or microorganisms have been integrated into fertilizer and pesticide products as an alternative to tackle the issues associated with traditional and conventional agriculture. The EU fertilizer regulation 2019/1009 define a plant biostimulants as ‘a EU fertilizing product the function of which is to simulate plant nutrition process independently of the products nutrient content’. Plant biostimulants stimulate natural processes in crops to i) enhance nutrient uptake, ii) nutrient use efficiency (NUE), iii) resistance to abiotic stress, and quality traits and iv) increase the availability of confined nutrients in the soil or the rhizosphere. They offer the opportunity to enhance fertilizer use and thus contribute to more sustainable crop production. The actual research between the scientific community and private fertilizer industry has led to design and to develop a third generation of plant biostimulants products (biostimulant 3.0) also called functional biostimulants with specific biostimulatory action to render agriculture more sustainable and resilient. This topical collection invites research paper, technology report, methods, opinion, perspectives, and invited reviews and mini reviews dissecting the biostimulation action of these natural compounds and substances (seaweed extracts, protein hydrolysates, humic substances, silicon, microalgae) and beneficial microorganisms (AMF and PGPR) on crops grown under optimal and sub-optimal growing conditions (e.g., salinity, drought, nutrient deficiency and toxicity, heavy metal contaminations, waterlogging, and adverse soil pH conditions). Also of interest are potential contributions dealing with the effect as well as the molecular and physiological mechanisms of plant biostimulants on nutrient efficiency, product quality and the modulation of the microbial population quantitatively and qualitatively.

Prof. Dr. Youssef Rouphael
Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Colla
Collection Editors

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