The Board of Editors from the Annals of Applied Biology together with the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB) and Wiley have systematically discussed new alternatives to make the journal more attractive and useful to its audience in the field of agricultural science. In 2019, Annals' Senior Editors agreed on the publication of special issues on key important topics/areas. The first special issue was published in 2020 on ‘International Advances in Plant Virology’, Volume 176, Issue 2 (Aranda, 2020) with 12 papers, among them Research papers, an Opinion paper on ‘Trends and gaps in forecasting plant virus disease risk’ by McLeish, Fraile, and García‐Arenal (2020) and 4 Minor Reviews (Asare‐Bedako et al., 2020; Mäkinen, 2020; Přibylová, Lenz, Fránová, Koloniuk, & Špak, 2020; Ssamula et al., 2020). All contributions in the special issue were published Open Access so anyone could benefit from these selected papers in the Plant Virology field.

We have now collated another Special Issue focused on the survival of plants under stress, a key topic in Agriculture. As previously agreed with AAB and Wiley, the special issue is also being made available Free or Open Access. So, please, download the papers and feel free to share with your colleagues, students and disseminate them through social media.

Climate change is here and many believe earth has reach the point of no return, or we are likely to be very close to it due to our irresponsible attitude towards the environment, the denial of many, and all human activities. Emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, increasing global temperatures, melting of icecaps and other environmental conditions everywhere in the world are pushing life in the planet into an unavoidable environmental catastrophe. This is all extremely worrying and makes crystal clear how much we have failed as a society in making our world a safe place to live and to ensure a much better and safer environment for next generations (selected references on general aspects of Climate Change potential impacts: Bordignon, Faria, França, & Fernandes, 2019; Molotoks, Smith, & Dawson, 2021; Pais et al., 2020; Shehzad, Gulzar, Staley, & Tariq, 2021; Verrall & Pickering, 2020).

We could name here a long list of xenobiotics and stressful conditions to which all living creatures have to face and cope with. The COVID‐19 pandemic of 2020 has also been a major test for humankind and the world has been able to come together to confront a shared global threat. The three of us share the idea that it was also a time, especially as the pandemic continues as we write, for people to think about the future of our planet and how we can be a part of a major change in our way ahead. We, but more especially, our future generations, deserve a much better planet to live in. There is no time to waste.

Plants are, and have always been, subjected to environment challenges. They do what they can to withstand all adverse conditions. They sense, adapt, evolve and have a cellular machinery to deal with such conditions, but only to a point. A shorter life cycle can be a way to avoid stress. Other plants develop stress tolerant mechanisms. A crop species such as tomato, for instance, can cope with some drought level and for a certain period of time, but when subjected to complete water suspension for a longer time, it will die. There is no genetic information, compounds or miraculous metabolic pathways that will change such a fate. Burning forests, destroying biomes, and so forth, can affect so much the environment that we need to understand how plants can effectively cope and produce a response that it will allow them to survive. Plants are sessile and cannot run away to avoid danger, and ‘we’ are the players who have to prevent the development of ever greater harm to the environment.

It is amazing to see the diversity of plant responses to a stressful situation; they have metabolites, enzymes, genetic diversity, and many unusual strategies to deal with such unfavourable conditions and survive. It is also known that the responses are dependent upon a number of situations, such as species, type of stress, magnitude of the stress, concentration of the xenobiotic, and many others.

The title and topic of this special issue was chosen to raise awareness of the extra pressure plants are having to face due to human activities and their subsequent effects on the environment. There are far too many problems to deal with when the environment is concerned for the reasons commented above. Therefore, we have to do something, on one side working on the reduction of the impact of Climate Change on the environment, and on the other, research new strategies and alternatives to help plants facing such increasing challenges. For instance, we are aware of many special issues published by several journals on plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses, to some of which we have ourselves contributed with articles. They are useful and we as other researchers have used such precious information reported from these special issues in our own research.

For this special issue we wanted something a little bit different with very recent information and with that extra spice! In a recent comprehensive review article (Soares, Carvalho, Azevedo, & Fidalgo, 2019), the authors expressed the huge headache that it is to track publications on plant responses to stress. Any search performed on any stressful agent in literature databases will reveal a large number of papers being published weekly! We have done this exercise: for instance, the number of articles published when ‘drought’ was used as a ‘Topic’, during the first week of December 2020 in the Web of Science™ multidisciplinary platform, a publisher‐independent global citation database, resulted in 185 hits! Thus, it is humanly impossible to keep up with what is being published, so we have to put extra work into refining the search using very specific and combined keywords to hopefully end up with what will most likely be a set of articles with the most relevant information on a specific topic.

Therefore, in this special issue we have attempted to bring together a group of international experts on different topics related to abiotic or biotic conditions that can produce damaging effects on plants. Despite the difficult year of 2020, we have been able to select a good number of research, minor and major review papers. The number of papers included in this issue is unprecedented in an Annals issue for a long time. They cover quite a wide range of subjects related to stressful conditions, and the authors are describing the latest advances. We trust these articles will be useful to a very large audience and we hope they can help researchers on their current and future research. We specifically asked the authors to make sure they share their own perspectives and present fresh ideas for the benefit of the readers. We did not want just another set of papers reporting what is already more or less known, but to discuss ideas or possibilities for the future of research in this field. Finally, we also hope to stimulate a broader, wider audience to consider Annals of Applied Biology as a vehicle for their research. So, please do submit your paper to Annals!

It is important to mention that we have authors from several countries and continents, many papers shared by authors from distinct countries showing strong collaborative action, which is quite impressive, and we thank them all.

Our role, as scientists, should be to produce advances to our knowledge so society can benefit from them. Plants are key players in this world for the benefit of humans, animals and any form of life on Earth. Finding ways to repair the disturbed environmental conditions and relations established through the years, decades and centuries of human race history, is our task and should be our mission. This special issue and the work done by so many authors and those they cited and preceded them, hopefully will add another small piece to the mosaic of human knowledge.

《应用生物学年鉴》编辑委员会与应用生物学家协会（AAB）和Wiley一起系统地讨论了新的替代方法，以使该期刊对农业科学领域的读者更具吸引力和实用性。在2019年，Annals的高级编辑就关键重要主题/领域的特殊问题发表了共识。第一期特刊于2020年发表在《植物病毒学的国际发展》第176卷第2期（阿兰达，2020年）上，其中有12篇论文，其中研究论文，关于``预测植物病毒病风险趋势和差距的意见书''由McLeish，Fraile和García-Arenal（2020年）和4次要评论（Asare-Bedako等，2020 ;Mäkinen，2020 ;Přibylová，Lenz，Fránová，Koloniuk和Špak，2020 ; Ssamula等，2020）。在特刊的所有捐款发表开放存取所以任何人都可以从植物病毒学领域，这些入选论文中获益。

现在，我们整理了另一本《特刊》，重点关注植物在压力下的生存，这是农业的一个重要课题。正如先前与AAB和Wiley达成的协议一样，该特殊问题还可以通过Free或Open Access获得。因此，请下载论文，并随时与您的同事，学生分享并通过社交媒体进行传播。

气候变化就在这里，许多人认为地球已经到了无可挽回的地步，或者由于我们对环境的不负责任的态度，对许多人类的一切活动和所有人类活动的否定，我们可能非常接近地球。二氧化碳和温室气体的排放，全球温度升高，冰盖融化以及世界各地的其他环境条件，正在将地球上的生命推向不可避免的环境灾难。这一切都非常令人担忧，这清楚地表明，作为一个社会，我们在使我们的世界成为安全的生活场所并确保为下一代提供更好和更安全的环境方面付出了多少努力（有关气候变化潜在影响的一般方面的精选参考文献： Bordignon，Faria，França和Fernandes，2019年; Molotoks，Smith和Dawson，2021年；Pais et al。，2020 ; Shehzad，Gulzar，Staley和Tariq，2021年；Verrall＆Pickering，2020年）。

我们可以在这里列举一长串所有生物都必须面对和应对的异种生物和压力条件。2020年的COVID-19大流行也是对人类的重大考验，世界已经能够团结起来面对共同的全球威胁。我们三个人都认为，这也是一个时刻，尤其是随着大流行的持续发展，人们可以思考地球的未来以及如何成为前进道路上重大变革的一部分。我们，尤其是我们的子孙后代，应该拥有一个更好的星球。没有时间可以浪费了。

植物一直（而且一直）遭受环境挑战。他们竭尽所能承受所有不利条件。他们感知，适应，进化并拥有处理这种情况的细胞机制，但仅限于某种程度上。较短的生命周期可能是避免压力的一种方法。其他植物发展出耐胁迫的机制。例如，诸如番茄之类的农作物可以在一定时期内应对一定程度的干旱，但是如果长时间完全悬浮水，它将死亡。没有遗传信息，化合物或神奇的代谢途径会改变这种命运。燃烧森林，破坏生物群落等可能对环境造成巨大影响，因此我们需要了解植物如何有效应对并产生响应，使它们得以生存。

令人惊讶的是，植物对压力情况的反应多种多样。它们具有代谢物，酶，遗传多样性和许多不寻常的策略来应对这种不利条件并生存。还已知响应取决于许多情况，例如种类，应激类型，应激程度，异生物素浓度以及许多其他情况。

选择本期特刊的标题和主题是为了提高人们对植物由于人类活动及其对环境造成的影响所必须承受的额外压力的认识。由于上述原因，在涉及环境时要处理的问题太多了。因此，我们必须做些事情，一方面致力于减少气候变化对环境的影响，另一方面，研究新的策略和替代方案来帮助植物面对日益严峻的挑战。例如，我们知道一些期刊发表了许多关于植物对非生物和生物逆境的反应的特殊问题，我们为其中的一些问题撰写了文章。

对于这个特刊，我们希望在最新信息和额外的香料方面有所不同！在最近的综合评论文章中（Soares，Carvalho，Azevedo和Fidalgo，2019年），作者表达了巨大的头痛，那就是要追踪有关植物对胁迫反应的出版物。在文献数据库中对任何压力因素进行的任何搜索都将发现每周都会发表大量论文！我们已经完成了这项工作：例如，在2020年12月的第一周，在Web of Science™多学科平台，独立于发行商的全球引文数据库中，将“干旱”用作“主题”时发表的文章数，导致185次点击！因此，跟上发布的内容是人类不可能的，因此我们必须投入额外的工作来使用非常具体且组合在一起的关键字来完善搜索，以期最终找到最相关的文章集有关特定主题的信息。

因此，在本期特刊中，我们试图召集一组与非生物或生物条件有关的不同主题的国际专家，这些非生物或生物条件可能对植物产生破坏作用。尽管2020年是艰难的一年，但我们仍然能够选择大量的研究，次要和主要评论论文。本期收录的论文数量在《 Annals》中是史无前例的发行了很长时间。它们涵盖了与压力条件有关的许多主题，作者正在描述最新进展。我们相信这些文章对广大读者将是有用的，我们希望它们可以帮助研究人员进行当前和将来的研究。我们特别要求作者确保他们分享自己的观点并提出新颖的想法，以使读者受益。我们不希望只是另一组论文来报道已经或多或少已知的内容，而是要讨论该领域研究的想法或可能性。最后，我们还希望激发更多的读者，将《应用生物学年鉴》视为其研究的载体。因此，请务必将您的论文提交给Annals！

值得一提的是，我们有来自多个国家和大洲的作者，来自不同国家的作者分享的许多论文都表现出强大的协作作用，这令人印象深刻，我们感谢他们。

作为科学家，我们的作用应该是促进知识的进步，以便社会可以从中受益。为了人类，动物和地球上任何形式的生命的利益，植物是这个世界上的关键角色。寻找方法来修复在人类历史，数十年和几个世纪中建立的受干扰的环境条件和关系，这是我们的任务，应该是我们的任务。这个特殊的问题以及众多作者以及他们引用和引用的作者所做的工作，有望为人类知识的拼接添上一小块。