Abiotic Stress Resilience: Mechanisms, Management, and Yield Stability
A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant-Crop Biology and Biochemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate intensification is driving more frequent and prolonged extremes, including heatwaves, prolonged droughts, salinity buildup from marginal water use, flooding/hypoxia, and compound stress events. These events disrupt the physiological, hormonal, molecular, and biochemical processes that determine crop productivity and stability. It involves disruptions in germination and plant establishment, source–sink imbalance, ionic and osmotic homeostasis, exclusion and compartmentalization, membrane disintegration, poor vegetative and reproductive tolerance/resilience, and poor coordination of carbon, nitrogen, and water. Despite remarkable advances in trait discovery and stress physiology, translating these mechanisms into robust yields with quality under field extremes remains the central bottleneck.
This Special Issue invites contributions that focus on how crop growth and yield are regulated under extreme abiotic stress, with a premium on work that links measurable performance across scales (from cell to canopy and field) and across Genotype × Environment × Management contexts. We welcome studies that cover the following issues:
- Plant stress physiology and associated traits and their mechanisms;
- Heat, drought, salt (salinity), waterlogging, high night temperature, and their interactions;
- Dissecting biochemistry and regulatory pathways (hormones, reactive oxygen species, signaling networks);
- Quantifying early-stage tolerance, resilience, and critical window effects during flowering and fruit sets, and identifying traits that preserve yield formation under extremes;
- Integrating omics with phenotyping;
- Root–soil–water dynamics;
- Mitigation strategies via germplasm or management practices.
We encourage original research, reviews/mini-reviews, methods, and data/protocol papers. Submissions using transparent datasets, field/lab validation, or decision-relevant metrics are especially welcome.
Dr. Bikash Adhikari
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- abiotic stress
- crop physiology
- yield stability and resilience
- stress tolerance
- source–sink regulation
- homeostasis
- shoot-to-root ratio
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