The potential of integrative phenomics to harness underutilized crops for improving stress resilience

The current agricultural and food system faces diverse and increasing challenges. These include feeding an ever-growing human population, expected to reach about 10 billion by 2050 combined with societal disruption, and the need to cope with the impact of climate change (FAO, 2022). Given that future environmental conditions will limit crop productivity (Zhao et al., 2017; Cooper et al., 2021) and the limited potential to continually increase the performance of staple crops by conventional breeding (Hickey et al., 2019), there is an urgent need to transform agricultural systems.