Agronomic and Breeding Strategies and Smart Technologies for Mitigating Drought Stress Impacts on Crop Plants

More than 50 percent of the arable land of Iran is at high risk of drought, and this has sounded the alarm for those concerned about food security to try to adopt effective strategies to deal with this issue. In this paper we aimed to present some agronomic and breeding strategies, and also smart technologies for monitoring and mitigating the drought impacts on plants, those have proved their positive effects on maintaining the yield of various plants in the country according to the numerous internal research. Accurately setting planting windows and density using decision support systems (DSS) and growth and simulation models, selecting proper cultivars, especially newly bred resistant idiotypes with desirable root and stomata characteristics, seed priming and coating methods, biofertilizers especially Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) and plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) and also soil modifiers and amendments such as zeolites and organic or polymeric superabsorbent are among useful agronomic and breeding strategies to maintain crop yield under drought condition. More importantly, Precision Irrigation (PI) through continuous monitoring of temperature, humidity, and rainfall using various technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) and cloud computing as well as remote sensing tools such as unmanned aerial systems equipped with thermal sensors have made a significant contribution to increasing plant performance in areas faced with water crisis. The proposed methods can be obtained according to their suitability with the agricultural systems and farmers' conditions based on available resources (labor, land, and affordability).