Mega–Environment Concept in Agriculture: A Review

Greater emphasis on future constraints to agricultural production is motivated by the projections of environmental change. The speed of population, change in climate and environmental has pressurized the crop community to understand the importance of those stresses which may result in the significant declines in yield. Advances in data availability, advance information technology, and new and improved methods to target genotypes to environments have benefited the crop improvement practices. No methodology is found in literature which integrates factors like climate, soil, land cover etc., and can predict the most suitable environment (Area) for growing maize based on its genetic variability. Mega-environment can be defined as a part, which may not necessarily be contiguous, of growing region of any species of a particular crop, with homogeneous environment which encourages similar genotypes to perform best. The MEs (homogeneous environments of production delineated on the basis of an agro-climatic) are helpful to the crop breeders in managing the genotype-by-environment interactions and then extrapolate the same within similar agro climatic areas. In this paper several research works are reviewed to provide emphasis on the Mega-Environment concept for crop improvement.