Integrative Plant Systems Biology: Linking Physiology, Metabolism, Ecology, and Biotechnology for Climate-Resilient Crop Improvement

Rapidly advancing climate change is altering plant growth environments with concomitant heat, drought, salinity, and oxidative stresses, compromising crop productivity and ecosystem function alike. These constraints disturb feedback of a network of networks to the regulation of photosynthesis, carbon allocation, hormone signalling, metabolism, and adjustments between plant‐environment interactions. Conventional gene-centred improvement approaches are not effective in handling the systemic and multiscale character of plant stress response. Therefore, a conceptual change to integrative plant systems biology is needed. Here, we compile how integrating molecular control, physiological organization, ecological dynamics , and biotechnological advances in simple systems could facilitate the predictive design of crops. Integration of multi-omics and network reconstruction uncovers how gene regulatory circuits, metabolic fluxes, and redox signaling together control growth–defense tradeoffs in response to environmental stress. Ecological and evolutionary considerations also illustrate how gene duplications, network rewiring, and plant–microbe interactions mediate adaptive capacity along environmental gradients. We emphasize emerging predictive strategies to consider genotype × environment × management interactions as a way to shift crop improvement from empirical selection toward system-guided optimization. These include advanced analytics and predictive design at the genome scale, where the emphasis is on network-level knowledge of DNA rather than individual genes. Ecosystem and sustainability principles must be embedded in engineered traits such that they can perform within complex agroecosystems. Through the integration of predictive multi-omics approaches to plant and crop biology, in combination with physiology, metabolism, ecology, and biotechnology, plant systems biology also offers a conceptual framework for the development of climate-resilient crops that can sustainably feed global populations in an increasingly harsh environment.