Editorial: Biostimulants in Agriculture

Abstract

Recently, the agricultural sector is facing concomitant challenges of rising the productivity to feed the growing global population and increasing the resources use efficiency, while reducing the environmental impact on the ecosystems and human health.In fact, fertilizers and pesticides play a crucial role in agriculture, representing a powerful tool for growers to increase yield and guarantee continuous productivity throughout the seasons under both optimal and suboptimal conditions.In the last three decades, several technological innovations have been proposed to enhance the sustainability of agricultural production systems, through a significant reduction of synthetic agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers.A promising and environmental-friendly innovation would be the use of natural plant biostimulants (PBs) that enhance flowering, plant growth, fruit set, crop productivity, and nutrient use efficiency (NUE), and are able also to improve the tolerance against a wide range of abiotic stressors (Colla and Rouphael, 2015).PBs were initially defined by excluding some functionalities like fertilizers or plant protection products.In 1997, in Grounds Maintenance web-journal, Zhang and Schmidt from the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, defined PBs as "materials that, in minute quantities, promote plant growth".By using the statement "minute quantities" for describing PBs, the authors implicitly wanted to discriminate biostimulants from nutrients and soil amendments, which also promote plant growth, but are clearly applied in larger quantities.The PBs mentioned in this web article were two important categories such as humic acids and seaweed extracts, and their action on plants was proposed to be essentially hormonal.In 2012, the European Commission has assigned an ad hoc study on plant biostimulants to evaluate the substances and materials involved, which was published by du Jardin (2012) as: "The Science of Plant Biostimulants -A bibliographic Analysis".Based on the scientific literature (250 scientific articles using the term 'biostimulant' in their titles and/or abstracts), the following definition was proposed: "Plant biostimulants are substances and materials, with the exception of nutrients and pesticides, which, when applied to plant, seeds or growing substrates in specific formulations, have the capacity to modify physiological processes of plants in a way that provides potential benefits to growth, development and/or stress responses".du Jardin (2012) concluded that PBs are very heterogeneous materials, and proposed in his study eight categories of substances that acts as biostimulants: humic substances, complex organic materials (obtained from agro-industrial and urban waste products, sewage sludge extracts, composts, and manure), beneficial chemical elements (Al, Co, Na, Se, and Si), inorganic salts including phosphite, seaweed extracts (brown, red, and green