Grasslands are a major part of the global ecosystem, and make a significant contribution to food security through providing part of the feed requirement of ruminants for meat and milk production. Breeding has the potential to improve the characteristics of grassland species to withstand adverse environmental conditions and to increase their overall growth and vigour. Grasslands consist of a mixture of several species that are adapted to specific ecosystems, and the breeding effort is directed mainly towards the major species, mostly for enhanced agronomic performance. It is only in the past decade that major efforts have been made in the field of ‘omics’ to unravel the underlying causes of the responses of forage species to environmental stimuli and to develop tools for selection in breeding programmes. This Highlight section of Annals of Botany comprises eight papers that examine various aspects of breeding for improvement in forage and grass species. The collection starts with a general overview by O'Mara (2012) of the role of grasslands in food security and climate change. Grasslands cover 69 % of the world's agricultural area. They have a key role in the environment and contribute indirectly to feeding a growing world population by providing feed for ruminants: globally, this is more important in energy terms than meat production from both pigs and poultry. More food will need to be produced from existing areas since the land area devoted to agriculture is not increasing. Grasslands also have an important environmental role in carbon storage and thus in alleviating climate change; however, they are under pressure to give way for crop production, and are threatened by changing environmental conditions. A great challenge in breeding still remains the assessment of the phenotypes of plants and this forms the topic of the next four papers, beginning with a general review of the area by Walter et al. (2012). Technological advances have been made at the laboratory and field levels in recent years, and the future of phenotyping for the mostly heterogeneous forage plants looks bright; however, a lot of effort is still required to move applications for plant breeding beyond the experimental scale. Metabolomic methods can offer opportunities in the phenotyping and characterization of forage plants, and Rasmussen et al (2012) present an overview of this topic. Metabolomics is still very expensive and technologically demanding, but clearly has a future in plant breeding if these hurdles can be overcome. To date, it has been very successful in model species and in cereals, but hopefully in the future it should also be very helpful in forage and turf species. An example of a successful application of metabolomics in forage is presented by Franzmayr et al. (2012), who use the techniques to describe the expression of a white clover isoflavone synthase in tobacco. Advanced phenotyping is very promising in combination with newer genetic-selection approaches in plant breeding, a field known as genomic selection. Nakaya and Isobe (2012) give an overview of the principles of genomic selection, including the minimum population sizes and molecular markers required. They conclude that whilst genomic selection is currently far from perfect, it is a potent, attractive and valuable approach for plant breeding and is likely to become integrated into many practical breeding programmes in the near future. Genetic engineering in outbreeding crops poses a challenge with regard to containment of transgenes and related regulatory issues. Wang and Brummer (2012) provide an overview of these topics and consider whether transgenesis is an option for the breeding of improved forage, turf and bioenergy species. To date, only one transgenic forage crop has been deregulated in the USA, and that was only after a lengthy and complicated process involving several rounds of regulation, deregulation and re-regulation. Nevertheless, this represents an important step, and the authors go on to consider and discuss recent progress in risk assessment and deregulation of transgenic forage and turf species. Most efforts for development of molecular markers are usually directed to the nuclear genome. Diekmann et al. (2012) demonstrate how, in Lolium perenne and related species, markers for the chloroplast genome also have a role to play in plant breeding. They conclude that the new markers represent a valuable tool for plant breeding companies, seed testing agencies and the wider scientific community due to their ability to monitor genetic diversity within breeding pools, to trace maternal inheritance, and to distinguish closely related species. In plant breeding, the most valuable marker system to assess population genetic structures is not necessarily the latest one, but instead one that is robust and informative, especially if large numbers of populations and individuals are being studied. This is very neatly exemplified by Collins et al. (2012) in a study on European red and white clover populations growing in different environments. AFLP markers are used to determine genetic differentiation within and between populations, and the results suggest that changes in population structure can occur within a short time span in forage legumes, resulting in the rapid formation of distinct survivor populations in environmentally challenging sites. Together, these papers illustrate that current efforts within the ‘omics’ technologies are producing exciting results that should greatly benefit breeding programmes in what has to date been the rather neglected area of forage, turf and bioenergy crops.