Risk Assessment of Atmospheric Pollution Effects on Vegetation under Climate Change
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Response to Abiotic Stress and Climate Change".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 May 2022) | Viewed by 12766
Special Issue Editors
Interests: tropospheric ozone; atmospheric nitrogen deposition; risk assessment; climate change
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: tropospheric ozone; ecophysiology; ecosystem effects; risk assessment; climate change
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Atmospheric pollution is known to affect crops and natural vegetation, inducing changes occurring at different levels from the cell metabolism to individual plants that may cascade into higher level effects on plant communities, interactions with soil microorganisms or insects and whole ecosystem biodiversity and functioning. Those changes have been described to vary depending on environmental growing conditions that influence both the deposition flux of pollutants and plant sensitivity. In turn, air pollutants may modify plant responses to other biotic and abiotic stresses induced by climatic change.
Risk assessment exercises are increasingly being used to describe air pollution effects under future climatic conditions on food security, ecosystem productivity or biodiversity and explore adaptation and mitigation options. In some cases, these risk assessments have consequences for environmental policy implementation. For instance, risk assessments based on critical loads and levels developed under the framework of the UNECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution are used to assess the potential benefits of adopting different emission reduction scenarios.
Risk assessments are normally dependent on dose–response relationships describing the potential effects of certain deposition flux levels on a range of response variables under current conditions. Response variables used for risk assessments most often describe effects on metabolism or individual plant level of sensitive species, and the potential interaction with other pollutants or the modulation of the response under a changing climate are not taken into account. Thus, risk assessment exercises under future climatic conditions will benefit from further research on response variables that link effects on metabolism or individual plants with whole ecosystem structure, functioning or ecosystem services, including the inter- and intra-specific variability in sensitivity, the interactions with other abiotic and biotic stresses and climate change factors that may modify ecosystem and crop responses to air pollutants and vice versa, and methods for better estimating or modeling air pollution deposition fluxes on crops and ecosystems under climate change conditions.
This Special Issue welcomes the submission of articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, modeling approaches, and methods) describing novel response variables or receptors, interactive effects between air pollutants and with climate change factors, adaptation options under combined air pollution and climate change scenarios, mitigation of atmospheric emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O, NH3, etc.) from agro- and ecosystems as a result of interactions with atmospheric pollution and climate change, and air pollution deposition flux estimation including the effect of changing climatic conditions, with a focus on tropospheric ozone and atmospheric nitrogen deposition. Results can be discussed in the frame of effects risk assessment at higher levels (food production, ecosystem services, biodiversity) under a climate change scenario.
Dr. Ignacio González-Fernández
Dr. Victoria Bermejo Bermejo
Dr. Vicent Calatayud
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Tropospheric ozone
- Atmospheric nitrogen deposition
- Climate change
- Phytotoxic ozone dose
- Dry nitrogen deposition
- Heat
- Drought
- Carbon dioxide
- Food security
- Ecosystem services
- Nutrient cycling
- Carbon sequestration
- Pollination
- Reproductive success
- Plant–plant/animal/microbiota/insect/pathogen interactions
- Biodiversity
- Critical loads
- Critical levels
- Risk assessment
