Navigating Extremes: Plant Adaptations to Flooding and Drought

Climate change is making both water extremes — excess water and water limitation — more frequent and more severe, and increasingly they strike the same regions, even the same fields within a single growing season. Plants meet these opposite stresses with responses that are partly shared and partly distinct: both disrupt water and oxygen relations, redox balance and hormone signalling, yet each also demands stress-specific acclimations. Most studies still treat excess water (waterlogging, flooding and submergence) and water limitation (drought) in isolation, so the common logic linking them — and the points at which their pathways diverge — remains poorly resolved. Equally under-explored is how signalling molecules and low-cost exogenous interventions can be used to build tolerance to both. Closing these gaps is central to sustaining crop productivity and ecosystem function as hydrological variability intensifies, and to designing practical, transferable strategies for water-stress resilience.This Research Topic aims to build an integrated, comparative picture of how plants sense, signal and survive the dual extremes of excess water and water limitation. The central problem it addresses is fragmented understanding: because the two stresses are usually studied separately, we lack a clear map of the convergent versus stress-specific molecular, hormonal and metabolic networks that govern survival. We seek contributions that resolve this — from transcriptomic and hormonal reprogramming, to physio-biochemical assessments, osmoregulation and compatible-solute accumulation (soluble sugars, amino acids), and energy-economization strategies such as the regulation of trehalose and sucrose metabolism and the suppression of energy-intensive cellulose and chlorophyll biosynthesis. A particular focus is the crosstalk of hormones (abscisic acid, ethylene, auxin) with other signalling molecules that coordinate energy-saving and stress-specific responses. By spanning molecular to whole-plant scales, and by including exogenous and biological interventions that mitigate water stress, the Topic aims to expose shared regulatory hubs and actionable levers for cross-tolerance, ultimately supporting sustainable agriculture under global environmental change.We welcome original studies and reviews that compare, or draw mechanistic links between, plant responses to excess water (waterlogging, flooding, submergence) and water limitation (drought), in model and crop species, from molecular mechanisms to whole-plant physiology with a particular emphasis on stress acclimation, cross-tolerance and mitigation strategies. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:• Shared versus stress-specific transcriptomic, hormonal and metabolic responses to excess water and water limitation• Hormone and signalling-molecule crosstalk (ABA, ethylene, auxin; ROS, H2S, melatonin, nitric oxide) coordinating water-stress responses• Osmoregulation and energy-economization strategies: compatible solutes (soluble sugars, amino acids), trehalose and sucrose metabolism; suppression of cellulose and chlorophyll biosynthesis• Ion and water transport, redox and cellular homeostasis under excess water and water limitation• Exogenous chemical agents, priming, and phytomicrobiome/PGPR approaches that mitigate water stress• Root and morphological plasticity, and germplasm diversity, underpinning cross-tolerance Topic editors: Dominik K Großkinsky, Vikas Srivastava Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85978/navigating-extremes-plant-adaptations-to-flooding-and-drought