A. POLJAKOFF-MAYBER and J. GALE The response of plants to saline environments is of interest to people of many disciplines. In agriculture the problem of salinity becomes more severe every year as the non-saline soils and the non-saline waters become more intensively and more extensively exploited. Further expansion of agriculture must consider the cultivation of saline soils and the use of water with a relatively high content of soluble, salts. Moreover, industrial development in many countries is causing severe water pollution, especially of rivers, and mismanagement in agriculture often induces secondary salinization of soils and sources of irrigation water. From the point of view of agriculture it is, therefore, of the utmost importance to know the various responses of plants to salinity and to understand the nature of the damage caused by salinity to agricultural crops. Botanists and plant physiologists study plants, their form, growth, metabolism and response to external stimuli. A challenging problem for them is to understand the differences between glycophytes, plants growing in a non-saline environment and halophytes, plants which normally grow in salt marshes, in sea water or in saline soils. This includes the elucidation of structural and functional adaptations which enable halophytes to tolerate the saline environment, and also questions as to whether they only tolerate the saline environment or actually thrive in it. Ecologists and environmentalists are interested in the interrelationships be tween the organism, in this case the plant, and its environment, from the climatic, edaphic and biotic points of view."

In keeping with the spirit of an Advanced Series in the Agricultural Sciences, we have attempted to address herein most of the current research areas being used to characterize, describe and manage salt-affected soils. Because of a certain amount of personal bias inherent in our individual viewpoints and backgrounds, some areas have been accorded more emphasis than others. It has been our goal, however, to provide either detail about, or at least a recent reference to, each major area of current soil salinity research. This information, coupled with what we hope to be a rather logical progression from descriptive material on equilibrium or near-equilibrium soil chemistry, through transport processes, to eventual management practices including some elementary economic decisions, should enable the reader to bridge the gap from introductory soil chemistry or soil physics texts to the basic literature of this area. The text will be perceived by the astute reader as somewhat uneven in its treatment of respective sections. We feel that this is to a certain extent appropriate, for it thus portrays the unevenness of progress to date in the corresponding areas of research. The management of saline and sodic soils remains largely an empirical semi-science or even art, whereas transport phenomena are normally dealt with in a much more theoretical (and also a much more highly mathematical) vein. Equilibrium soil chemistry has historically occupied an intermediate position with respect to its mix of empiricism and theoretical rigor.

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