European Journal of Sustainable Agroecosystems

More than 1.38 billion hectares of soils across the globe is salinized, representing approximately one-tenth of the total irrigated and rainfed agriculture land, which is one of the greatest limitations for cereal growing in arid, semiarid, and coastal agroecosystems. Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is one of the most salinity-resistant cereals and, thus, is an important crop and is also widely-used as a genetic model of salinity resistance studies in cereals. In the last ten years, the rapid development of the emerging high-throughput phenotyping allows for the evaluation of salinity responses at a new level of speed and resolution, leaving behind the conventional methods of destructive endpoint isolation in favor of continuous studies of whole plants and plant organs. In this review, the authors summarize all the peer-reviewed articles dated from 2015 to 2025 and relevant to phenotyping of salinity resistance in barley found in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and some institutional/international grey literature (FAO, ICBA, and CGIAR). After conducting the PRISMA-style screening process, fifty-six studies were found to meet the inclusion criteria. This review has been arranged in themes including: imaging and growth kinetics of shoot; root system imaging; physiological phenotyping and ionomics; genetic dissection using QTL mapping and GWAS; and the new technological integration of machine learning with multi-sensor construction and multi-omics data. The studies presented in this review have shown that the biomass from the imaging analysis can correlate with that obtained through destructive harvest while sodium exclusion and tissue tolerance turned out to be the most important physiological mechanisms in the studies presented. The review also displays the importance of some sodium-transporting loci in the mapping studies. However, the majority of studies mainly focus on laboratory environment studies or seedling stage experiments. No new results have been obtained in terms of root imaging studies in saline conditions, experiments at a reproductive stage, standardization of cross-platform data, or application of machine learning models to real practices. Variations in osmotic and ionic stress contributions and the degree of heritability for image-based characteristics continue to create confusion. The paper indicates that phenomics has significantly advanced barley salt research; however, for phenomics to reach its full potential, all methodological inconsistencies must be cleared up along with phenotyping at later growth stages carried out, and the applicability of phenomics, genomics, and environment information in collaboration with each other should be implemented in a manner that implies their compatibility. The authors offer useful instructions for experts, crop developers, and decision-makers who want to develop salt-resistant crops within the incomplete structure of phenomics.