Global food production is forced to search for new approaches to protect plants from harmful organisms and environmental factors. One of the alternatives could be the use of salicylic acid (SA) and its derivatives. Overall, the effects of SA at the primary ecosystem level are encouraging, contribut-ing to improved productivity and quality of many plants and improving tolerance to many stressors. The secondary level of effects of SA in the environment represents the effects on harm-ful organisms due to direct action and also the indirect effects of SA that occur due to morphological and physiological changes when the plant adapts to stressors. In many cases, SA has the effect of reducing infections, and it also acts as a deterrent to some pests. After being attacked by a pest, plants release volatile compounds into the environment, mainly SA derivatives such as methylated SA (MeSA). This attracts the natural enemies of pests, which could be used to protect plants from pests, as MeSA has been found to act as an attractant in many species. Salicylates have a very wide spectrum of action, which trigger various effects in the environment, which intertwine with each other and consequently affect several levels in the exosystem. In this article, we divided the effects of salicylates according to different levels in the environment, which gave us a broader in-sight into the potential use of salicylates in agriculture.
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