Artificial Intelligence, Foundation Models, and Digital Twins for Climate-Resilient Agriculture: A Review

Abstract

Climate change, increasing food demand, and resource constraints are accelerating the transition from conventional precision agriculture toward smart, autonomous, and climate-resilient agricultural systems. Artificial intelligence (AI), foundation models, digital twins (DTs), the Internet of Things (IoT), remote sensing, edge–cloud computing, and big data analytics are emerging as key technologies for data-driven agricultural management. This review critically evaluates recent advances in AI-driven intelligent agriculture, with emphasis on machine learning, deep learning, explainable AI (XAI), generative and agentic AI, multimodal foundation models, and digital twins, together with the sensing and computing infrastructures required for their deployment. Relevant literature was identified using keywords related to AI, foundation models, digital twins, IoT, precision agriculture, and climate-resilient agriculture, with emphasis on recent peer-reviewed studies addressing technological applications, performance, limitations, challenges, and future prospects. The selected literature was critically synthesized to identify technological trends, knowledge gaps, and emerging research opportunities. The review highlights that the greatest potential of intelligent agriculture lies in integrating heterogeneous data from sensors, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), satellites, weather systems, field operations, and agricultural knowledge to support context-aware prediction, decision-making, and autonomous action. However, data quality, model generalizability, explainability, interoperability, cybersecurity, computational requirements, and large-scale field validation remain major challenges. This review further develops an integrated perspective connecting AI, foundation models, multimodal data infrastructures, digital twins, and autonomous agricultural systems within a unified cyber-physical ecosystem. Future priorities include trustworthy AI, agentic decision-making, semantic interoperability, federated learning, continuous learning, and self-learning digital twins toward Agriculture 6.0.