Preliminary Study On Compensation Effect Of Maize In Water Stress

Pot experiment was conducted to study the compensation of maize under water stress.The results indicated that the compensation effect of maize on ecological and physiological characteristics were likely to appear during rewatering.Degree of compensation effect dependeds on stress stage, stress duration and stress severity.The main results were as following:(l)The development and growth of mazie were depressed during stress.Some indexes such as the height of plant ,leaf area,dry matter accumution, photosynthesis, chlorophyll fluorescence and root activity were restricted.The degree of inhibition for the treatments stressed in jointing stage is higher than seedling stage.(2)The development and growth of maize showed compensation effect after rewatering. The degree of compensation effect depended on stress stage, stress duration and stress severity.After rewatering,for the mild degree and short duration treatment stressed in seedling stage, the height of plant ,leaf area and dry matter accelerated and showed over-compensation.The other stress treatments in seedling stage showed compensation too, and the tendency enhanced with the increasing of water stress degree and duration. They did not approach to the mild degree and short duration treatment in seedling stage.After rewatering, the compensatory effect of the development and growth for the treatments stressed in jointing stage is inferior to seelding stage.(3)After rewatering,the degree of compensation effects of physiological characteristics depended on stress stage, stress duration and stress severity.After rewatering, the recovery of the leaf photosynthetic characteristics for all the stressed treatments in seedling stage had long-term after-effects. The photosynthetic rate did not recover in short time,and the duration of recovery increased under severier and longer water stress.The leaf photosynthetic rate of stressed treatment greatly exceeded CK in tasseling stage.The chlorophyll content of leaves,root activity,photochemical efficiency and the potential activities of PSII of stressed treatment exceeded those of CK.Which is likely to be the latent factors for the compensatory effect ofphotosynthetic rate after rewatering...