Discovered salt-tolerant plants that absorb hundreds of tons of salt per square kilometer of land

Chinese researchers have found a highly salt-tolerant plant that improves soil fertility in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The area of ​​saline soil in Xinjiang amounts to 110,000 square kilometers, accounting for one-third of China's total saline land, which has significantly limited the sustainable development of agriculture in the region.

Suaeda salsa

Since the early 2000s, the Xinjiang Institute of Geography and Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has studied saline areas across Xinjiang and conducted screening of hundreds of salt-tolerant plant species. With the ability to absorb salt and improve soil quality, they finally found a high-yielding plant named Suaeda salsa.

Suaeda salsa is a species of flowering plant in the Amaranth family, with a range extending from Central Europe, Eastern Europe, to Siberia and China. The genus Suaeda currently has about 110 described species, most of which are restricted to saline or alkaline soils.

A cluster of Suaeda salsa experimentally grown in Inner Mongolia

The team tested Suaeda salsa in Xinjiang, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions. The results show that they can absorb and process hundreds of tons of salt per square kilometer of saline soil annually. Some saline-alkali barren land has been converted to normal farmland three to four years after planting Suaeda salsa.

The Xinjiang Institute of Geography and Ecology also found that Suaeda salsa can be used as a vegetable and forage, as well as helping to greenen saline-alkaline soils. They have given free seeds to farmers, research institutes and businesses in the hope of scaling up this particular salt-tolerant crop soon.