Lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus subsp. culinaris) is an important pulse crop in the farming systems in many countries for human food, animal feed, and for soil health improvement. But its adaptability and productivity are limited due to various abiotic stresses, such as drought, cold, salinity and mineral imbalances. Of them, drought is the most prevailing environmental stress responsible for substantial production loss, occurs in almost all lentil-growing areas, as it is grown as a rainfed crop. Winter-hardiness is a key trait to grow winter lentil in cold-prone highlands. Other edaphic and environmental stress factors are localized and cover relatively small areas. As the inheritance of resistance/ tolerance to abiotic stresses is generally polygenic and the incidence of the stresses is unpredictable, the efficiency of selection for these traits has been limited. Recently, QTLs for winter-hardiness have been identified to facilitate marker-assisted selection.

Various approaches, strategies and screening techniques have been used by International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) with partners to identify genotypes under various abiotic stress conditions. ICARDA has the largest collection of >10,000 accessions of cultigens and wild relatives globally, which is the key to the genetic improvement of the crop. Selection of lines and segregating populations for drought, winter-hardiness, salinity, boron toxicity and deficiency is done in target environments. The strategy of pyramiding traits for these abiotic stresses is being followed during selection at various stages of the breeding cycle. Following these approaches, we have developed drought tolerant and winter-hardy nurseries, and promising lines have been released as varieties by national programs. To improve selection efficiency for better performance under stress conditions, new screening techniques based on physiological and biochemical traits need to be developed to identify genotypes for abiotic stress tolerance.