Three environmental indices determine SOC
Unlike previous research, which
focused on identifying a single environmental factor to represent
environmental mean in studies of phenotypic plasticity (Li et al., 2018,
Guo et al., 2020), we uncovered three environmental factors as
fundamental to plant growth and development. The inclusion of multiple
factors is advantageous for capturing the complex and multifaceted
nature of the genotype–environment–phenotype relationship, while also
enhancing the accuracy of predicting traits in new environments (Millet
et al., 2019). Although these factors are closely related, we did not
consider the issue of multicollinearity in this study due to our
emphasis on prediction, but it should be taken into account when
determining the significance of these factors (Kim, 2019). We
demonstrated that environmental factors have various influences on the
final phenotype at different developmental phases, particularly the
growth windows of 183–192, 166–195 and 144–186 days after planting,
which align with the flowering or pod-filling stages of B. napus .
It would be ideal to identify specific environmental indices for each
genotype (Sabir et al., 2023), but a more practical approach should use
a harmonized index shared by all genotypes for prediction and
application purposes.