The salinity of soil has a dramatic effect on the success rate of germination of plant seeds (Boscaiu, Estrelles, Soriano and Vicente, 2005). Soil salinity even plays a large role after germination for the proper development of the plant (Villagara and Cavagnaro, 2005) as even though the plant may be in a less saline environment the plants growth will continue to be stunted.
The effect of salinity on plants differs from species to species; as some are more tolerant than others (Villagara and Cavagnaro, 2005). Studying the threshold at which different plant species can successfully germinate is of great importance. This is of great importance to farmers where soil salinity is more likely to increase (). Thus we can ascertain that understanding the effect of soil salinity is important to ensuring crop success for agriculture.
Maintaining biodiversity is important to the biosphere as food webs are easily disrupted by changes. An increase in salinity in an environment will have a negative effect on flora’s germinations success. Understanding wild type flora’s ability to tolerate increases in the presence of salt will be crucial to managing the salt concentrations of different environments and understanding the effect of different genes on the tolerance of salt (Mito, Seki, Shinozaki, Ohme Takagi and Matsui, 2011).
The aim of this experiment was to establish the effects of salt on the germination of fenugreek and Barley seeds and to determine how tolerant they are to salinity