  Life finds a way. For sessile organisms like plants, the need to adapt to
changes in the environment is even more poignant. For humanity, the need to
develop crops that can grow in diverse environments and feed our growing
population is an existential one. The development of fast-growing,
high-yielding crop varieties sparked the Green Revolution, and the advent of
the genomics era enabled the development of customized transgenic crops
enhanced for specific traits or resistances. Today, the proliferation of
artificial intelligence (AI) allows scientists to rapidly screen through
massive and complex datasets to uncover elusive patterns in the data, enabling
us to create more robust and faster models for prediction and hypothesis
generation in a bid to develop more stress-resilient plants. This review aims
to provide an overview of the evolution of environmental stress research across
the plant kingdom over the past fifty years. It will cover historical landmark
concepts and discoveries that were seminal in advancing the field, provide a
global snapshot of our current scientific progress, and conclude with a
discussion on the advent of AI tools that would help accelerate scientific
discovery.
