Anticipate, acclimate, recuperate and remember: How spatiotemporal signal integration controls flooding stress resilience in plants

Flooding is a major abiotic stress that restricts terrestrial plant growth and survival. A plant tissue's ability to avoid or sustain critical oxygen deprivation (hypoxia) and subsequent re-oxygenation damage is vital for its survival. Submergence triggers rapid ethylene and hypoxia signalling that in turn control acclimation responses, promoting plant resilience. Interestingly, an extensive range of additional environmental and internal factors were shown to influence these canonical signalling pathways associated with flooding acclimation and tolerance. Here, we discuss how such integrative ethylene- and hypoxia-dependent signalling enables plants to anticipate and prepare for potential flooding-induced hypoxia stress, fine-tune acclimation according to the environmental and internal metabolic context, and effectively orchestrate re-oxygenation responses. Furthermore, plants naturally experience environmental stress manifold throughout their lives, which may lead to long-term morphological adaptations and the encoding of stress memory to promote survival against sequential stressors.