**5. Prospects**

This chapter ultimately illustrates that genomic signatures of environmental adaptation (e.g. [51]) are useful for germplasm characterization, potentially enhancing future marker-assisted selection and crop improvement. We envision that genome-environment association studies coupled with estimates of genome-wide diversity will become more common in the upcoming years. These types of studies will likely go beyond estimates of drought tolerance, as exemplified here, to also include estimates regarding frost stress (i.e. [52–54]), nutrient limitation [55, 56], as well as other threats imposed by climate change [57, 58] in different types of ecosystems (e.g. [59]) and screened by a variety wide range of genotyping techniques [60–63]. Genomic selection models [64] could also incorporate at some point environmental variables in order to improve the prediction of phenotypic variation and the estimation of the genotype-by-environment interactions as well as phenotypic characterizations through novel high-throughput methods such as remote sensing and image analysis [65], and novel models such as genome-environment associations [66] in the light of linkage disequilibrium (LD) [67] and various stochastic approaches [68, 69].
