Research on Trace and Hazardous Elements and Emerging Pollutants in Soils and Sediments

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue, contributions covering special studies on soils and soil extracts are welcome. Apart from monitoring and screening possible pollutants, within the last decade, new technologies and pollutants have emerged that need to be considered. Much research has been conducted in the past, but some gaps in our knowledge remain. In particular, contributions should be focused on the following:

1. Mobile soil fractions and their dependency on mineral composition, grain size, and the kinetics of dissolution.
2. Mobile soil fractions and proof of soil-to-plant transfer via respective pot and field experiments.
3. Elemental compositions of nanoparticles in soil extracts and groundwater, determined by micro-diffusion or time-of flight ICPMS.
4. Non-invasive screening for plastic and microplastic particles or combustion-derived particles by using, e.g., near-infrared or magnetic methods.
5. Interactions of surfaces of manmade materials (plastics, alloys, and other waste materials) with solutes in soil, such as sorption or surface modification reactions.
6. Sanitation and recovery strategies of soils, such as stabilization procedures, soil washing, phytoextraction, and metal recovery from metalliferous plants and waste.
7. Screening of rarely determined elements such as rare earths, platinum metals, bromine, and iodine.
8. Investigations of element proportions of geochemically and physiologically similar elements, such as K/Rb, Ca/Sr, Al/Sc, Mo/W, and S/Se, possible indications of soil formation and weathering processes, and physiological discriminations.

Research on these topics should help characterize defined sources, such as waste deposits, sewage, and manure, ore formation, mining and smelting, soil excavations from metalliferous areas, fertilizers, traffic, and atmospheric inputs. Further insights may include soil formation mechanisms and the success of restoration and remediation measures.

Nanoparticles are expected to exert less environmental mobility, such as migration in the soil column and leaching to the groundwater. They can be of direct technological origin, but also derived from corrosion and weathering.

The fitting of mobile fractions to simulate soil-to-plant transfer or the transfer to benthic organisms are frequently a matter of copy-and-paste experiments which were conducted some decades ago. Thus, experiments involving different organisms under various nutrient and climatic conditions are still lacking.

Multi-element capabilities and improved detection limits via, e.g., ICP-MS and ICP-OES offer the possibility of determining the levels of less known elements situated beneath the main commonly explored elements, nutrients, and pollutants.

Dr. Manfred Sager
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Soil Systems is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1800 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.

• trace and hazardous elements
• emerging pollutants
• soils
• sediments