The rapidly changing worldwide climate, influenced with detrimental human activities, has significantly affected horticultural crop cultivation. Plant growth, yield, and quality may be severely impacted in stress environments like salinity, low moisture availability, low to high temperature variation, and presence of heavy metal. Living organisms like viruses, fungi, bacteria, insects, vectors, and nematodes may also cause reduction in yield, vigour, and productivity. Crops must modulate metabolism and activate defence mechanisms to cope with such environmental stresses for higher economic produce. A comprehensive understanding of how abiotic and biotic stresses influence horticultural crop growth, along with the mechanisms involved in mitigating these stresses, is crucial for improving crop resilience. Researchers around the world have provided a wide range of mitigation approaches where they suggested that the use of novel bio-stimulant chemicals, antimicrobial peptides, novel phyto-protectants, and PGPR enhances the resilience of crops against the environmental stresses.
To understand the responses of fruit crops to stresses, studies must be initiated at the physiological level resulting in knowledge development about signalling, biochemical activities, and plant hormone responses. Additionally, research at all four ‘omics’, i.e. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics level may also be very helpful. Study about the gene regulation under abiotic and biotic stress at transcriptional and translational level may help us better understand the crops response to stresses which may be utilized for developing improved crop genotypes for climate change mitigation. Management strategies include traditional methods like pesticides, plant growth regulators, biocontrol agents, and biostimulants and crop rotation, as well as modern technologies like biological control, integrated pest management, technologies particularly precision agriculture, genomics, MAS, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), genomic selection (GS), transformation of gene, gene editing, nano-biotechnology, and artificial intelligence based technologies offer innovative stress control solutions and predictive modelling capabilities, thereby reshaping biotic and abiotic stress management by optimizing resource use and early stress detection. This knowledge could help develop new approaches to enhance crop durability and output for sustainable horticulture.
