Salinity poses serious threats to landscapes across the globe, decreasing the capacity of all types of terrestrial ecosystems in providing services by threatening our biodiversity, lowering agricultural productivity, deteriorating the environment, contaminating groundwater below standard level, enhancing flood risks, food security issues and restricting the economic growth of a community. Reclamation measures are required to reverse the process of land degradation caused by salinization; otherwise, the trend towards salinization is expected to grow beyond control in developing countries. The scientific community and the policy-makers around the globe have been testing long-term technologies including physicochemical, conventional breeding and genetic engineering involving state of the art molecular tools for more than three decades. Nevertheless, they have failed due to reasons like non-technical feasibility reports, reliability and affordability issues coupled with sustainability constraints at field level. This review discusses the potential prospects of Pennisetum genus (Poaceae) for integrated, sustainable, robust and profitable saline agriculture based on phytoremediation agro-technique. Our approach is the first ever record, providing a novel insight into a cost-effective biotech agro-technique. Pennisetum species are environment-friendly future candidates with prospects for all stakeholders to materialize higher average productivity at the field level, posing lesser competition for resources with standard conventional crops.

This pilot study aims to find whether C3 and C4 Poaceae species can be separated by their pollen grain size. One hundred and sixty Poaceae species were prepared for pollen grain size analyses using standard methods. The whole dataset included 70 species from northern Pakistan, 35 species from Tanzania, 25 from South America and 30 from Germany. We measured four pollen grain parameters, i.e. pollen grain length, pollen grain width, pore diameter and annulus width. Results of the statistical tests and multivariate analyses performed on our specific dataset confirmed that C3 polyploid and C4 polyploid species show trends of larger grain size than the respective diploid species. Results of our fresh Poaceae grains should be applied on fossil pollen embedded in environmental archives for reconstructing past climate, for detecting shifts between their C3/C4 Poaceae compositions and assessing the dynamics of grassland ecosystems.

Traditional medicine is cheaper and easily available to local people, to care for most frequent diseases in the Northern parts of Pakistan. Our study aimed at inventorying medicine from local plants, documenting their uses, and assessing their market value in 2015-2018 during spring, summer, and winter seasons. A total of 15 trips were made, 5 in each season. Semi-structured interviews with 165 inhabitant’s age range between 20-80 years were conducted, analyzed the data is analyzed using Relative frequency of citation(RFC), Use Value(UV), Fidelity Level(FL), Informants consensus factor(ICF), and Jaccard index(JI) to find the most frequent and well-known used species in the area. A total of 86 species belonging to 39 vascular plant families, 33 genera were documented as medicinally important. Family Asteraceae was observed as the dominant family among all the families with 10 species, the leaf was the most used parts and decoction 36% was the most preferred preparation type. Herb was the predominant life form (67%). The maximum UV (0.92) was demonstrated by J. adhatoda L. species, while A. sativum L. shows maximum RFC (0.58), the highest ICF value represented by diarrhea and dermatitis 0.92, and high FL value is recorded 100%. According to our collections, wild species were 45%, invasive species were 38% and cultivated 17% recorded, dicots species were recorded more 81%. Seven 7 medicinal species is being economically important and export to the local and international market of the world, whereas P. integrima L. species were the most exported species according to the local dealers. The investigated area is rural and the local people depend on the area's plants for their health needs, and other uses like a vegetable, fuelwood, fodder, etc. The current result of RFC, UV, ICF, FL, and JI shows that medicinal flora needs to be pharmacologically and phytochemically investigated to prove their efficacy. The documentation of medicinal knowledge is important to preserve this precious old knowledge before it is lost forever, due to technological and environmental changes in the world.