Editorial: Advanced breeding for abiotic stress tolerance in crops, volume II

Abiotic stresses, encompassing extreme temperatures (heat, cold), salinity, drought, and heavy metal toxicity, pose severe threats to global agricultural productivity and food security (Guan et al., 2025;Wang et al., 2025;Yang et al., 2024;Zeng et al., 2025). With the intensifying impacts of climate change, the frequency and intensity of these stresses are rising, necessitating urgent and advanced strategies for breeding climate smart crop varieties (Song et al., 2025;Wei et al., 2025;Zhu et al., 2025). Building upon the foundation laid in the previous volume, this Research Topic aims to further deepen our understanding of the complex molecular mechanisms governing abiotic stress tolerance in crops, so a multifaceted strategy integrating physiological, biochemical, and molecular insights can be developed to breed abiotic stress resilient crop varieties. This collection features 26 articles (22 Original Research,4 Reviews) that collectively push the boundaries of abiotic stress research. Rather than viewing stress tolerance as isolated physiological responses, the works presented here converge on a central theme: the integration of multi-scale biological data-from single-gene functions to genome-wide networks and field-level genotype-by-environment (G×E) interactions-to engineer resilient crops.