Soil Quality and Innovation in Agriculture: Dynamics, Indicators, and Sustainability
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Soil Conservation and Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 27 October 2024 | Viewed by 1916
Special Issue Editor
Interests: soil quality; soil health management; soil quality monitoring; soil organic carbon pools; re-use of agricultural and municipal wastes on soils; Use of innovative technologies in agriculture/precision agriculture
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Life on Earth depends on healthy soils. Soil is the living skin of our planet that is essential for the provision of food, clean water, good air, safe climate, and biodiverse landscapes. Globally, soils store about 80% of the carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, making them the largest terrestrial carbon sink. However, soils are fragile, and the impact of our actions on soils are often overlooked or ignored. To ensure a healthy and green future for our current and future generations, we need to protect and take care of soils.
Soil quality has emerged as the central concept for examining and integrating relationships and functions among various biological, chemical, and physical parameters of soils, which are important in the context of sustainable land use and management.
Soil quality degradation has been one of the major challenges affecting the agriculture sector, and soil management could serve as an essential tool for improving soil quality in agricultural lands. Assessing soil quality involves the measurement of physical, chemical, and biological soil properties that act as soil quality indicators and using them to identify soil properties that may inhibit soil function or to monitor soil management practices’ effects on soil quality. Nowadays, innovations in agriculture could provide new tools for the sustainable soil management that could enhance the soil quality of our lands.
This issue focuses on the advances of soil quality research, including the methods of soil quality monitoring, potential indicators and their dynamics, which could be used for the soil quality assessment, and the effect of innovation in agriculture on soil quality dynamics.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Soil quality indicators and their dynamics;
- Methods of soil quality monitoring;
- Management and restoration of soil quality in different soil environments;
- Evaluation of the impact of soil quality degradation on agricultural production;
- Innovations in agriculture affecting soil quality and sustainability.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Eleftherios Evangelou
Guest Editor
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. Sustainability 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 2400 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
- soil quality indicators
- sustainable soil management
- soil quality monitoring
- innovation in agriculture
- soil functions
