Climate change intensifies biotic and abiotic stresses, threatening global crop productivity. High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) technologies provide a non-destructive approach to monitor plant responses to environmental stresses, offering new opportunities for both crop stress resilience and breeding research. Innovations, such as hyperspectral imaging, unmanned aerial vehicles, and machine learning, enhance our ability to assess plant traits under various environmental stresses, including drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, and pest and disease infestations. These tools facilitate the identification of stress-tolerant genotypes within large segregating populations, improving selection efficiency for breeding programs. HTP can also play a vital role by accelerating genetic gain through precise trait evaluation for hybridization and genetic enhancement. However, challenges such as data standardization, phenotyping data management, high costs of HTP equipment, and the complexity of linking phenotypic observations to genetic improvements limit its broader application. Additionally, environmental variability and genotype-by-environment interactions complicate reliable trait selection. Despite these challenges, advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation are improving the precision and scalability of phenotypic data analyses. This review critically examines the dual role of HTP in assessment of plant stress tolerance and crop performance, highlighting both its transformative potential and existing limitations. By addressing key challenges and leveraging technological advancements, HTP can significantly enhance genetic research, including trait discovery, parental selection, and hybridization scheme optimization. While current methodologies still face constraints in fully translating phenotypic insights into practical breeding applications, continuous innovation in high-throughput precision phenotyping holds promise for revolutionizing crop resilience and ensuring sustainable agricultural production in a changing climate.

Sorghum is a vital cereal crop recognized for its resilience under marginal soil and stress conditions. To identify high-yielding, climate-resilient accessions for breeding, this study implemented a two-stage, dual-year approach that is rarely reported in grain forage sorghum research. First, 26 accessions alongside BARI Jowar-1 were evaluated under well-watered conditions to assess genetic diversity in agronomic traits. Significant variability was observed among accessions for agronomic traits, including days to flowering, days to maturity, plant height, panicle length (PL), grain yield per plant (GY), grain size, number of grains per panicle (GP), and thousand grain weight (TGW). High broad-sense heritability and genetic advance were noted for GY, GP, PL, GW, and TGW, indicating the potential for genetic improvement through selection. Multivariate analyses, including biplots, hierarchical heatmaps, and K-means clustering, identified BS-718, BS-746, and BS-749 as high-yielding and early-maturing accessions suitable for further evaluation. In the second stage, these three accessions and BARI Jowar-1 were evaluated under 60% field capacity and well-watered conditions to assess physio-biochemical and yield responses under water-limited environment. Water stress significantly reduced photosynthetic gas exchange attributes, leaf water potential, relative water content (RWC), photosynthetic pigments, PL, and grain yield across all accessions while increasing intercellular CO ₂ concentration and leaf temperature. The magnitude of these reductions varied, with BARI Jowar-1 exhibiting the highest sensitivity and pronounced declines across measured traits, whereas BS-718 maintained higher RWC, pigment stability, gas exchange efficiency, and yield under drought condition, confirming its superior drought resilience. This integrated framework combining broad phenotypic screening with targeted physiological validation provides novel insights into sorghum variability and identifies BS-718 as a promising resource for developing drought-tolerant, high-yielding sorghum varieties. Further field trials and molecular characterization of these high-performing germplasms are warranted to facilitate the development of high-yielding, climate-resilient sorghum varieties.