Three-dimensional (3D) crop phenotyping is increasingly used to capture crop structure, but its value for crop protection is conditional rather than automatic. 3D approaches are operationally justified only when reconstructed geometry adds decision-relevant information beyond simpler 2D, spectral, scalar, or conventional baselines. This review examines 3D crop phenotyping through a reconstruction–trait–task–maturity framework for crop protection and synthesizes evidence across disease assessment, pest and stress interpretation, pesticide dose adjustment, spray deposition, weed-target perception, protection-oriented breeding, and digital-twin development. The literature is organized through four connected lenses: reconstruction routes that generate crop geometry, 3D traits that may alter protection reasoning, decision pathways that link traits to intervention variables, and maturity levels that distinguish static 3D models, validated phenotypic traits, process-coupled systems, protection outputs, and outcome-updated decision twins. The strongest decision-facing evidence currently comes from canopy-based dose adjustment, deposition prediction, drift reduction, and related spraying applications in which 3D traits are linked to intervention variables and field-facing comparators. Disease, stress, and architecture-aware modelling provide important but more heterogeneous evidence, while many point-cloud datasets, segmentation pipelines, neural reconstruction methods, and agricultural digital-twin frameworks remain upstream of practical crop-protection decisions because they do not yet connect 3D measurements to validated protection labels, comparator baselines, decision thresholds, intervention outputs, or outcome updating. A central conclusion is that high-fidelity 3D representation should not be conflated with decision-twin maturity. Protection-oriented digital twins require explicit coupling among synchronized crop geometry, functional or epidemiological models, decision rules, and recorded field outcomes. This review therefore identifies the evidence and reporting priorities needed to move 3D crop phenotyping toward validated, deployment-oriented, and feedback-aware crop-protection support.
Zeng et al. (Sat,) studied this question.