Abstract: Global climate changes have increasing impacts on worldwide environments. Crop productivity is largely determined by interaction between the genotype a crop has and the environment surrounding the crop plants. With modern biotechnologies, genotypic contribution to a phenotype can be dissected at molecular level into individual genetic components. However, the environmental factors that have significant impacts on crops have not been dissected individually, and thus their contribution to phenotype can be only inferred by their integrative effect under different types of environments, or described for the whole experimental plot by comparing pairwise major environmental factors. The author proposed a concept of environmental assay for the first time by coining a word “etyping”, which represents “envirotyping”, a more suitable word used in this article. The term “envirotype” is used to describe all internal and external environmental factors and their combinations that affect plants across growth and developmental stages. The external environmental factors include moisture, fertilizers, air, temperature, light, soil properties, cropping system and companion organisms. Envirotyping refers to dissecting and measuring all these environmental factors. Environmental information can be collected through various approaches, including multi-environmental trials with environmental data accumulated related to trial locations; geographic and soil information systems containing environmental data for climate, weather, and soil; and small weather stations that collect factors related to weather, precipitation, temperature and air. Using remote sensing and other instruments, many external environmental factors can be measured for plant canopy, plant surroundings, and even for single plots or individual plants. Environmental information will be increasingly used for environment characterization, genotype-by-environment interaction analysis, phenotype prediction, disease epidemic prediction, near iso-environment construction, understanding of the response of plants to specific environmental factors, agronomic genomics, and precision farming. In the future, envirotyping needs to be improved to zoom into specific plots and individual plants across growth and developmental stages, along with the development of integrative information system and decision support tools to bring genotypic, phenotypic and envirotypic information together. Envirotypic information will finally contribute as a third dimension to the crop research and development system involving genotype-phenotype-envirotype complex. Such efforts will help establish a high-efficient crop breeding and production system based on the concept of the three-dimensional profile.

Key words: crop production, environmental information, envirotype, envirotyping (etyping), genotype-by-environment interaction, near iso-envirotype, agronomic genomics, phenotype prediction