Smart Breeding and Crop Genetic Resources for Climate Resilience

Climate change is reshaping the breeding target itself. Beyond shifts in mean temperature and precipitation, breeders increasingly face greater interannual variability, more frequent extreme events, and complex stress sequences such as drought followed by heat waves, salinity interacting with heat, or temperature spikes coinciding with critical reproductive stages. These dynamics challenge conventional selection strategies that rely on relatively stable target environments, and they expose the limits of improvement approaches that focus on single stresses or single locations. Building climate-resilient crops therefore requires breeding frameworks that explicitly account for environmental uncertainty, yield stability, and risk of failure across diverse production systems.Crop genetic resources remain the most durable source of adaptive potential to meet this challenge. Landraces, historical cultivars, crop wild relatives, and underutilized species harbor alleles and haplotypes that have been filtered by selection in marginal or fluctuating environments. However, despite major investments in conservation and characterization, a persistent gap remains between the existence of diversity in genebanks and its routine use in breeding pipelines. Key bottlenecks include incomplete trait information in relevant stress scenarios, limited capacity for high-quality multi-environment evaluation, linkage drag associated with exotic introgressions, insufficiently optimized bridging strategies, and a shortage of operational decision rules for prioritizing donors and designing populations under time and resource constraints.“Smart breeding” offers an opportunity to close this translation gap by integrating genetic resources into pragmatic, end-to-end pipelines that accelerate delivery of resilient cultivars. In this context, “smart” does not refer only to novel algorithms or omics generation, but to breeding designs and decision frameworks that increase efficiency and robustness: targeted pre-breeding and donor selection, optimized introgression and population development strategies, carefully designed selection indices that balance yield, resilience, and quality, and evaluation schemes that capture climate-relevant stresses, stress sequences, and genotype by environment interactions. A smart breeding approach also requires clear definitions of climate resilience in breeding terms, including metrics for yield stability, stress recovery, and risk management that are meaningful for farmers and seed systems.This Research Topic will provide a focused forum for contributions that move from genetic resources to breeding outcomes and, ultimately, to deployment-ready germplasm. We welcome studies that demonstrate how genetic resources can be mobilized effectively through pre-breeding, bridging populations, and introgression strategies; that propose reproducible evidence standards for “useful diversity” in climate resilience; and that show how breeding programs can make release-relevant decisions when environments are uncertain and stress patterns are shifting. Contributions should emphasize practical insight and transferability across crops and regions, including well-designed case studies that document decision points, trade-offs, and validation across environments.By centering translation and implementation, this Research Topic aims to strengthen the pathway from conserved diversity to climate-resilient varieties. The overarching goal is to accelerate genetic gain for resilience while ensuring that the resulting cultivars are not only stress-tolerant in controlled settings, but reliably productive across real-world, variable, and increasingly extreme conditions. Topic editors: Dragana Miladinović, Ankica Kondic-Spika, Boris Lazarević Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78498/smart-breeding-and-crop-genetic-resources-for-climate-resilience