Plant stress biology and climate‐resilient crop improvement: Integrating physiology, genomics, and breeding

Abstract

Global agricultural systems are increasingly threatened by abiotic and biotic stresses, including drought, heat, salinity, flooding, pathogens, insect pests, and weeds, all of which substantially reduce crop productivity and yield stability. Climate change is expected to intensify the frequency and severity of these stresses, making the development of climate‐resilient crops a global priority. Advances in plant stress physiology, molecular biology, genomics, and quantitative genetics have significantly improved our understanding of plant adaptive mechanisms. At the same time, innovations in high‐throughput phenotyping, genomic selection, speed breeding, genome editing, and artificial intelligence‐assisted breeding have accelerated the identification and deployment of stress‐adaptive traits. Despite these advances, most previous reviews have examined plant stress biology, genomics, and breeding technologies separately, providing limited integration of these complementary disciplines into practical crop improvement strategies. This review addresses this knowledge gap by critically synthesizing current knowledge of plant stress biology with recent advances in genomics‐assisted breeding, phenomics, genome editing, predictive breeding, and climate‐smart agronomic management within a unified framework for climate‐resilient crop improvement. Particular emphasis is placed on breeding for combined stress tolerance, integrating genomic and phenomic information, and exploiting emerging biotechnologies to improve resource‐use efficiency, enhance yield stability, and accelerate genetic gain. The review further evaluates current scientific and practical challenges, identifies key knowledge gaps, and outlines future research priorities to support the development of resilient cropping systems that sustain agricultural productivity under increasingly variable climatic conditions.