Abraham Blum passed away on 10 March 2018, at the age of 84 years. During his five-decades-long career, he published two  influential books (Blum 1988, 2011) and over 150 scientific papers  in peer-reviewed journals, the vast majority of which focused on the functional basis of drought tolerance in cereals as related to proxy traits involved in the adaptive response to water deficit.

His first book, Plant Breeding for Stress Environments published in 1988 (reprinted in 2018) is viewed as the first comprehensive treatise on how plants can be selected to cope with drought stress through traits to avoid or tolerate dehydration. Abraham pioneered and championed the study of traits and proxies (e.g. cell membrane stability, canopy temperature, osmotic adjustment, ABA accumulation, stem reserve mobilization, etc.) able to enhance our understanding of crop plasticity under environmental constraints while providing information for predicting yield under such conditions. Amongst adaptive proxies, he strongly advocated osmotic adjustment (Blum, 2017) and canopy temperature which he championed since the early ‘80s (Blum et al., 1982). In a number of thought-provoking and at the time controversial manuscripts (Blum 2005, 2009, 2016), he challenged some of the commonly held beliefs concerning drought resistance in crops.

Abraham was also a strong advocate of a multidisciplinary approach for investigating and enhancing crops’ resilience to abiotic stress, particularly drought. In this, his foremost and greatly appreciated contributions to those engaged in drought-related research were the launching and management of the www.plantstress.com website and the organization of the InterDrought congress series, which he chaired twice, in 2005 (Rome) and 2009 (Shanghai). The participants at the InterDrought V conference (Hyderabad, 2017) sent their good wishes to Abraham during his illness, completely covering a poster with messages of support, the best testimony of the appreciation and respect the interDrought community had toward him.

The InterDrought community will miss Abraham greatly as a dear friend, teacher and colleague with tremendous enthusiasm, optimism and endless dedication. The www.plantstress.com website will continue his legacy.

Selected referances

Blum A.  1988. Plant breeding for stress environments. CRC Press. Reprinted in 2018.

See https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=yLxHDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Blum A. 2005. Drought resistance, water-use efficiency, and yield potential—are they compatible, dissonant, or mutually exclusive? Australian Journal of Agricultural Research 56, 1159–1168.

Blum A. 2009. Effective use of water (EUW) and not water-use efficiency (WUE) is the target of crop yield improvement under drought stress. Field Crops Research 112, 119–123.

Blum A. 2011. Plant breeding for water-limited environments. Springer.

Blum A. 2016. Stress, strain, signaling, and adaptation–not just a matter of definition. Journal of Experimental Botany 67, 562–565.

Blum A. 2017. Osmotic adjustment is a prime drought stress adaptive engine in support of plant production. Plant, Cell & Environment 40, 4–10.

Blum A, Mayer J, Gozlan G. 1982. Infrared thermal sensing of plant canopies as a screening technique for dehydration avoidance in wheat. Field Crops Research 5, 137–146.