Plant acclimation and adaptation to cold environments

This chapter addresses the key issues related to susceptibility and resistance in agronomic species as well as wild species that are native to temperate, high-latitude, and high-altitude environments. It discusses the future benefits that such an integrated understanding might afford at a time of rapid change in prevailing winter climate over the coming decades. Plants growing in cold environments are evolutionarily adapted to cold and freezing temperatures and often high light intensities. A better understanding of the interplay of the complex of cold and other stresses, to which plants are often subjected in vivo, is beginning to pay large dividends. The chapter discusses freezing injury, freezing avoidance and tolerance, cold deacclimation (dehardening) and reacclimation (rehardening), space and temporal considerations of plant responses, and plant cold acclimation.