Plant Nutrition for Environmental and Production Sustainability
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Agriculture".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2023) | Viewed by 5111
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant nutrient; rhizosphere ecology; plant-soil-microbial interaction
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
To ensure future food security, resource sustainability, and feeding the world’s growing population, continuously increasing the crop yield with less chemical inputs on a limited space of land is necessary. Plant nutrition is a science that fundamentally impacts all aspects of cropping systems, environmental sustainability, and human health and wellbeing. Over the past several decades, the over-use of chemical fertilizers has been the main practice to maintain crop yields, resulting in environmental problems and mineral toxicities in relation to agricultural soils. Therefore, new agricultural practices, comprehensive nutrient management, and new fertilizer products and plant breeding strategies should be adopted to enhance nutrient-use efficiency and agricultural production sustainability, and to reduce negative environmental impacts. However, our understanding of how the “plant–soil–microbe interaction” affects mineral elements absorbed by crops and alleviates soil mineral toxicities remains limited, despite the recent studies emerging as an attempt to unravel and present the mechanisms by which these processes occur.
The contributions to the gaps in the knowledge include new practices, such as the intercropping and/or multiple cropping systems used to enhance nutrient-use efficiency and soil fertility; plant breeding to enhance nutrient-use efficiency or nutrient-uptake efficiency from the soil; new fertilizer products used to enhance the nutrient-use efficiency of crops; new products used to enhance healthy soil and alleviate soil pollution; PGPR to assist in the nutrient uptake by crops; agricultural waste recycling to enhance soil fertility; and the optimization of fertilizer applications for economic and environmental sustainability.
The current Special Issue is a collection of studies that advance our understanding of how sustainable agriculture can enhance nutrient-use efficiency, and explore the underlying mechanisms used to potentially achieve environmental and production sustainability. The current Special Issue will mostly consist of experimental studies complemented by reviews and opinion papers on the topics associated with “root–soil–microbial interaction to enhance nutrient-use efficiency”. In particular, we encourage submissions of experimental papers involving:
An understanding of the plant–soil–microbe interaction under different farming practices; Realistic longer-term, field, or mesocosm studies.
We also encourage submissions of papers that explore the meta-analytic, novel technological, or modeling approaches used to understand enhanced nutrient-use efficiency, soil fertility, and reduced environmental impact.
Dr. Xiaoyan Tang
Dr. Usman Irshad
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- plant–soil–microbe interaction
- nutrient-use efficiency
- soil fertility
- soil element toxicities
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