Abiotic stresses: Challenges for plant breeding in the coming decades

Abstract

Modern agriculture has been providing food, feed, fiber and more recently biofuel to meet the World's demand. One of the bases of this modern agriculture is the improved cultivars, which are much higher yielder than ancient ones. The scientific literature documents the significant contribution of plant breeding to agriculture and finally food production worldwide. Now-a-days, agriculture has new and huge challenges, due to population growth, the pressure on agriculture liability on the environmental conservation, and climate change. To cope with these new challenges, many plant breeding programs have reoriented their breeding scope to stress tolerance in the last years. So, in this book, experts on plant physiology and on plant breeding presents the most recent advances and discoveries applied to abiotic stresses, discussing the new physiological concepts, breeding methods, and modern molecular biological approaches to develop improved cultivars tolerant to most sorts of abiotic stress.