stress-aware greenhouse climate control: integrating plant physiology, intelligent environmental control, and energy management for sustainable protected horticulture

Greenhouse climate management is undergoing a paradigm shift from maintaining fixed environmental setpoints toward dynamic, plant-centered control strategies that optimize crop physiological performance while minimizing energy and water consumption. despite remarkable advances in greenhouse technologies, most existing climate-control approaches remain environment-driven and frequently overlook the dynamic interactions among temperature, vapor pressure deficit (vpd), radiation, carbon dioxide concentration, and plant physiological responses. this review synthesizes recent advances in stress-aware greenhouse climate control by integrating plant physiology, environmental sensing, intelligent control algorithms, and energy-efficient engineering solutions into a unified conceptual framework. the analysis demonstrates that plant stress is more accurately characterized by physiological indicators including canopy temperature, stomatal conductance, transpiration, chlorophyll fluorescence, daily light integral, and vpd than by conventional environmental thresholds alone. comparative synthesis further reveals that individual climate-control technologies effectively mitigate specific stress factors but inevitably introduce trade-offs among energy demand, water consumption, carbon retention, and disease risk. emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, digital twins, wireless sensor networks, and multi-objective predictive control, provide new opportunities to optimize greenhouse climate simultaneously for crop productivity, resource-use efficiency, and environmental sustainability. based on this synthesis, we propose a stress-aware greenhouse climate-control framework in which environmental regulation is guided by real-time plant physiological status rather than fixed climatic setpoints. the framework supports adaptive decision-making across diverse greenhouse systems and provides a foundation for the next generation of intelligent, resilient, and low-carbon protected horticulture.