Climate change and water exploitation has intensified the frequency, duration, and severity of drought events while accelerating soil and substrate salinization across many agricultural regions. These combined stresses pose a substantial threat to crop productivity, fruit quality, and the stability of agri-food systems. Drought limits water availability and disrupts hydraulic functioning, whereas salinity imposes osmotic and ionic constraints that impair root water uptake, metabolic processes, growth and development. Together, these stresses create a multifaceted challenge that is particularly detrimental in perennial and fruit-bearing crops, where disruptions in water transport, solute dynamics, and carbon allocation have direct consequences on yield, nutritional value, and postharvest performance. Despite extensive research on water stress and salinity as individual factors, significant knowledge gaps remain regarding the integrated responses along the soil-plant-fruit pathway. Most studies isolate specific components of the system, limiting our ability to fully understand how soil constraints scale up to physiological processes and ultimately determine fruit traits and production sustainability.

This special issue aims to bridge these disciplinary gaps by promoting research that holistically examines the hydraulic, physiological, biochemical, and metabolic and several omics pathways that underpin crop resilience under drought and salinity stress. By explicitly focusing on the soil-plant-fruit pathway, this topic highlights the need for mechanistic and system-level approaches that explain how stress signals are initiated in the root-soil interface, propagate through the plant hydraulic network, and ultimately manifest in fruit development, composition, and quality. Understanding these complex interactions is essential for designing sustainable production strategies that enhance water-use efficiency, reduce vulnerability to climate change effects, and support resilient agri-food value chains. Welcome are contributions on all horticultural and agricultural crops which search to present a system approach connecting soil-plant-fruit or in between levels under abiotic stress through drought and/or salinity.

Climate change is intensifying abiotic stresses in agricultural systems, particularly drought and salinity, which increasingly co-occur across arid and semi-arid regions.

These stresses directly constrain soil-plant-fruit water relations, disrupt soil-root interactions, and impair physiological processes essential for growth, yield, and fruit quality. Drought reduces soil water availability and hydraulic connectivity, while salinity imposes osmotic and ionic constraints that alter root water uptake, metabolism, and carbon allocation. In fruit and perennial crops, such disturbances propagate through the soil-plant continuum and ultimately affect fruit development, composition, and postharvest performance. Although substantial progress has been made in understanding drought and salinity responses independently, their impacts across interconnected biological scales remain insufficiently resolved. Addressing these challenges requires integrative approaches that link soil processes, plant hydraulics, and fruit physiology to improve resilience and sustainability of agri-food systems.

Despite extensive literature on drought and salinity, most studies focus on isolated system components, such as soil properties, root physiology, or leaf gas exchange, without fully integrating how stress signals originate in the soil, propagate through plant hydraulic and metabolic networks, and manifest in fruit traits. This compartmentalized approach limits our ability to explain variability in crop performance, fruit quality, and water-use efficiency under drought and salinity. Moreover, emerging evidence suggests that key processes, such as hydraulic segmentation, osmotic adjustment, soil-root feedback, and stress elasticity, operate across scales and cannot fully understood in isolation.

The main goal of this research topic is to fill this gap by assembling interdisciplinary studies that explicitly connect soil conditions, plant physiological responses, and fruit development under drought and salinity. The collection aims to promote mechanistic, system-level insights that integrate hydraulics, biochemistry, and emerging omics approaches, ultimately supporting the design of resilient cropping strategies and sustainable agri-food production systems under climate change scenarios.

This research topic focuses on integrative, multi-scale analyses of crop responses to drought and salinity, with particular emphasis on soil-plant-fruit linkages. Contributions are welcome across horticultural and agronomic crops, including annuals and perennials. The scope includes, but is not limited to, the following subthemes:

• Soil hydraulic, chemical, and biological constraints under drought and salinity

• Soil-root interactions, rhizosphere processes, and water uptake mechanisms

• Plant hydraulic architecture, stomatal regulation, and carbon-water-tradeoffs

• Fruit development, composition, quality, and postharvest performance under stress

• Integration of phenotyping, modeling, and omics approaches (transcriptomics and metabolomics)

• Management, breeding, and irrigation strategies improving resilience and water-use efficiency

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

Integrated Crop Responses to Drought and Salinity: Soil-Plant-Fruit Pathways Toward Resilient and Sustainable Agri-Food Production