Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Crop Stress Adaptation and Resilience

Crop plants have evolved under a wide range of environmental conditions and possess a broad range of adaptive strategies to cope with stress. However, modern agriculture often exposes crops to new combinations of abiotic and biotic stresses, which can change both ecological interactions and evolutionary patterns. Environmental stress affects plant growth and fitness, species interactions, microbial communities, biodiversity and agroecosystem functioning. At the same time, evolutionary processes (e.g. local adaptation, selection, genetic diversification and phenotypic plasticity) are involved in crop resilience and long-term sustainability. Recent advances in ecological monitoring, evolutionary genomics, high‐throughput phenotyping, and climate modelling offer novel opportunities to study crop responses across multiple biological scales. Understanding these eco-evolutionary dynamics is important for food security in a rapidly evolving environment.Across the world, agriculture is challenged by an increased number of different environmental constraints including drought, heat, salinity, flooding, nutrient limitations and emerging biotic threats. These stressors are becoming more frequent and severe under climate change and threaten crop productivity, ecosystem stability and food security. Despite much progress in elucidating the molecular basis of stress responses, there remains a critical need to integrate ecological and evolutionary perspectives in order to better understand how crops adapt and persist in dynamic environments.The goal of this Research Topic is to expand our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes that control crop responses to stress. We seek to integrate disciplines and explore the effect of environmental stresses on crop adaptation, resilience, phenotypic plasticity, and interactions with surrounding biotic communities. The collection will help develop sustainable and resilient agricultural systems to meet future global challenges by integrating knowledge from ecology, evolution, genetics, agronomy, and environmental sciences.This Research Topic welcomes original contributions that explore ecological and evolutionary aspects of crop responses to environmental stress. Studies may focus on major crops, orphan crops, landraces, wild relatives, or agroecosystems across diverse climatic regions.Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:• Mechanisms of adaptation to stress in crops (ecological and evolutionary)• Crop biodiversity, genetic diversity and stability of ecosystems• Crop selection and evolution under stress• Phenotypic plasticity, adaptation to changing environments• Modelling and predicting crop responses to environmental change• Impacts of climate change on crop resilience and productivity• Eco-evolutionary dynamics in agro-ecosystems• Crop-microbe, crop-pest and crop-environment interactions under stress• Resilience and adaptability of traditional landraces and crop wild relatives• Sustainable and climate resilient agro-ecosystemsWe invite Original Research, Reviews, Perspectives, Methods, Data Reports, and Opinion articles that provide novel ecological and evolutionary insights into crop stress biology and resilience. Topic editors: Vijay Gahlaut, Sunil S. Gangurde, Sundeep Kumar, Dinesh Kumar Saini, Vandana Jaiswal Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85000/eco-evolutionary-dynamics-of-crop-stress-adaptation-and-resilience