Enviromics and Abiotic Enviromics: Enhancing Stress Biology and Plant Resilience Breeding

Crop breeding faces mounting challenges from climate change, population growth, and shrinking farmland. While management and genetic improvement have contributed to yield gains, sustainable agriculture demands continuous progress to address local and future environmental stresses. Approximately 60% of past yield increases are attributed to improved abiotic stress resilience, yet further breeding advances are constrained by the complexity of environmental factors, which often co-occur dynamically within farming systems. Enviromics-an emerging field dedicated to high-throughput environmental characterization-enables comprehensive dissection of the "E" term in genotype × environment (G × E) interactions, improving predictive models for complex traits. Understanding how enviromics elucidates environmental effects and G × E will uncover novel mechanisms underlying crop resilience. In this perspective, we critically review the concepts of enviromics and abiotic enviromics and their impacts on plant stress responses. We further present a forward-looking view on enviromics-driven genetic improvement for abiotic stress adaptation, emphasizing that integrating enviromic-assembly with multi-omics and predictive modeling holds transformative potential for decoding molecular mechanisms and accelerating climate-smart variety development. This framework offers a strategic pathway toward sustainable agriculture and global food security.