The current changes in fruit production scenario challenged the quality and quantity of fruits required for the vast population. The abiotic and biotic stresses, encountered at critical growth stages and adversely affect productivity of plants. The abiotic stresses like drought, extremes temperature floods and salinity have emerged as major challenges for production of crops. The different abiotic stressescause morphological, anatomical, physiological and biochemical changes and ultimately impacting the productivity and quality of plants. Timely intervention with appropriate adaptation strategies would help in realizing sustainable yields and further enable to overcome adverse effects of abiotic stresses. Successful cultivation of crops and attaining reasonable yields under abiotic stress situations mainly depends on the available adaptation options. Practices like modification in cultural practices, adopting novel irrigation, choice of tolerant rootstocks, choice of tolerant cultivars/crops and biotechnological approaches are to be implemented for alleviating adverse effects. Though, the productivity of fruit crops remains low in areas experiencing abiotic stresses. Therefore, focus is required for developing integrated location-specific and crop- specific adaptation strategies for various abiotic stresses. The integration of all available adaptation options would be the most effective approach in sustaining the production and productivity of fruit crops under abiotic stresses.

Background The incidence of wilt disease of cashew (Anacardium occidentale L.) caused by Fusarium sp. has recently emerged in two-year-old cashew trees in an experimental field at the Regional Agricultural Research Station, Pilicode, in the Kasaragod district of Kerala, India. The disease was characterized initially by chlorosis of foliage and shoots, followed by necrosis and wilting, with internal symptoms including vascular necrosis, eventually resulting in complete plant mortality. Methods A fungal pathogen was isolated repeatedly from the infected vascular tissues onto potato dextrose agar medium. Symptomology, cultural, morphological and molecular studies were performed to characterize the pathogen causing the disease. Results In culture, the colony of fungus was white, later turning pink. The fungus produced both macro and micro conidia in culture. Molecular characterization revealed the identity of the isolates as Fusarium decemcellulare Brick. Pathogenicity of the isolate was confirmed in cashew seedlings, thereby demonstrating Koch’s postulates. Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first record of wilt disease of cashew caused by F. decemcellulare in India. The culture of the fungus has been deposited with the National Fungal Culture Collection of India at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune, India with accession number NFCCI 4801, and sequence of the fungus was deposited at GenBank of NCBI with accession number OP942472.