Editorial: Physiological, molecular and genetic perspectives of environmental stress response in plants

Rapid changes in environmental conditions due to climate change affect agricultural crop production worldwide and create unprecedented challenges. Despite new developments in plant science research and technology, achieving a decent yield under changing environmental conditions continues to be a great challenge (Ehrhardt and Frommer, 2012; Fuglie, 2021). Moreover, modern agriculture has to deal with future climate change and must meet the demands of a rapidly increasing population and food security. With the complexity of different environmental stresses caused by climate change, there is a need for the scientific community to deploy new approaches for understanding the ecological consequences, effect on physiological and agronomic traits, and to uncover the tolerant mechanisms, and identify the candidate targets for crop improvement programs (Yuan et al., 2019; Pascual et al., 2022; Zandalinas and Mittler, 2022; Garg et al., 2023). Understanding the physiological, molecular, and genetic perspectives of environmental stress responses in plants is crucial to cope with the hostile effects of climate change in the present and future scenarios in agriculture. This Research Topic aims to offer the opportunity to plant scientists worldwide to present past and emerging insights related to environmental stresses and crop improvement. Various contributions were received and those published are summarized as follows.