Plants frequently encounter numerous challenges, especially abiotic stressors such as drought, salinity, heat, and cold. Despite significant progress in understanding plant responses and tolerance to individual stress factors, comprehensive knowledge of the effects of multiple simultaneous and/or sequential stress factors and their interactions is still lacking. Moreover, climate change exacerbates the severity of stress events, increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, salinity, and heat waves. Understanding how plants acclimate to multiple stressors is crucial, particularly as climate change increases the risk of exposure to the combinations of stressors, potentially reducing plant growth and productivity. Recently, the integration of phytohormones and stress signaling molecules has become a widely used approach to improve stress tolerance in plants. Developing climate-smart crops with better yields under these challenges is imperative to meet future food requirements.

This Research Topic aims to unravel the roles of plant hormones and signaling molecules in orchestrating responses to stress conditions, and to understand the integrated processes that lead to the acclimatization and survival of plants under various abiotic stressors and their combinations. The objective is to advance the development of climate-smart crops with the potential to tolerate climate change adversities, thereby supporting sustainable food production amidst the challenges posed by climate change.

We invite researchers from diverse backgrounds to contribute their expertise and knowledge to this topic. The interaction between two stress conditions can result in either negative or positive effects on plant growth and productivity. Hence, we welcome articles that explore both directions of these interactions, elucidating the underlying mechanisms and their implications for plant responses.

To ensure a focus on impactful, applied research, we will not accept purely descriptive studies. Submissions of all article types accepted by Frontiers in Plant Science are welcome. Manuscripts are particularly encouraged to focus on, but are not limited to, the following subthemes:
• The effects of different abiotic stress factors and their interacting effects on plant physiological performance
• Mechanistic insights into plant responses to combined drought and salinity stress
• Understanding ROS regulation under combined salinity and drought stress
• Tools or resources for engineering drought- and salt-resistant crops
• Cellular and morphological responses of stressed plants to phytohormones and signaling molecules
• Role of stress signaling molecules in abiotic stress tolerance
• Physiological mechanisms regarding phytohormone-mediated enhancement under combined stress conditions
• Advances in transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, and genomic integrated breeding approaches for enhancing stress tolerance

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

Abiotic Stress Combination: Improving Resilience to Develop Climate-Smart Crops