Hello! Actually I want study soybean physiology under stress in the field condition. Can you please suggest the probable techniques to create and maintain drought stress for plants.
Applying various drought treatments is a great challenge to those doing such research. There are many kinds of drought, and plants have various responses to each kind. The first step is to be very clear on what drought-respose process you intend to study; it is not meaningful to try to do everything at once.
In some situations, the stress intensity can be varied with irrigation. That is particularly relevant in areas where regulated deficit irrigation is a potential application of the results. But irrigation changes the humidity, which may interfere with the inferences you are hoping to make.
In wetter climates, rain shelters are sometimes used. But they are generally unsatisfactory because the rainy weather stresses the unwatered plants very differently from the sunnier weather than would exist during an extended drought. While this technique is commonly used (requiring enormous effort), the results are rarely applicable to the real drought situation.
Pot experiments are only meaningful for studying the immediate molecular or physiological responses, they can not be used to infer anything about field performance. That would require validation of all predictions in field trials over many growing seasons that vary in drought intensity and timing.
Stress can be caused by several factors; however, whatever the stressing factor (e.g. temperature, water...), it is usually necessary to have control on the level of the stress applied, although partial control of the stressing factor may also be useful as long as we monitor the levels of such factor. We can then use statistical tools to determine the relationship between the levels of the stressing factor with the plant responses.
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