Review: Plant eco-evolutionary responses to climate change: Emerging directions

•To predict plant responses to global change accurately, researchers need to integrate across the entire life cycles, from germination to reproduction.•Studies need to simultaneously manipulate multiple climate change factors to predict the stability of populations under future climates.•Studies need to incorporate biotic interactions and include microbes to evaluate organismal responses to environmental conditions.•We call for additional funding for research on tropical biodiversity hotspots.•Emerging omic tools will dissect the genetic basis of climate change responses . Contemporary climate change is exposing plant populations to novel combinations of temperatures, drought stress, [CO2] and other abiotic and biotic conditions. These changes are rapidly disrupting the evolutionary dynamics of plants. Despite the multifactorial nature of climate change, most studies typically manipulate only one climatic factor. In this opinion piece, we explore how climate change factors interact with each other and with biotic pressures to alter evolutionary processes. We evaluate the ramifications of climate change across life history stages,and examine how mating system variation influences population persistence under rapid environmental change. Furthermore, we discuss how spatial and temporal mismatches between plants and their mutualists and antagonists could affect adaptive responses to climate change. For example, plant-virus interactions vary from highly pathogenic to mildly facilitative, and are partly mediated by temperature, moisture availability and [CO2]. Will host plants exposed to novel, stressful abiotic conditions be more susceptible to viral pathogens? Finally, we propose novel experimental approaches that could illuminate how plants will cope with unprecedented global change, such as resurrection studies combined with experimental evolution, genomics or epigenetics.