Human activities are continuously changing worldwide the fluxes of chemicals and materials in the land-river-ocean continua. Current industrial, urban, and rural activities add an excessive amount of nutrients, metals, organic compounds, plastics, gases, minerals, and other materials to soil, rivers, and overall aquatic systems, creating contamination and acute episodes in estuaries and coastal zones. This disturbs the biota (pollution) leading to an unbalanced ecology alteration of the food chain. As a consequence, this also impacts economic and social activities culminating in the disruption of established (nutrient) cycles. The extension of how these contaminant fluxes impact the oceans, from the smaller to the largest estuaries, is still uncertain, mainly from a seasonal, tidal, multidisciplinary and global point of view despite several governmental and academic efforts.
It is increasingly reported that climatic changes impact directly water cycles in a way not seen before, including on the transport of contaminants along the land-water nexus. Therefore, not only the rise of contaminants and pollutants must be researched, but how they are carried and how they interact with the ocean in the different coastal ecosystems. Estuaries from low to high latitudes have been impacted and the associated ecosystems (coral reefs, mangroves, etc) and species have been endangered because of the lack of water and sediments quality or even because of effects of salinization or desalinization. Besides, new chemicals and materials are produced every day and to understand their origin, behavior, and fate are crucial to properly managing their impact in the oceans.
The goal of this Research Topic is to collect different works that disclose not only the concentration of contaminants and pollutants in the coastal zone but their fluxes and possible interactions with geology, physics, and/or biology. We hope to produce an important volume that updates the discussion regarding the fluxes of contaminants and pollutants in the land-ocean continua from small to large rivers bringing state-of-art papers. Temporal and multidisciplinary studies that address different ecosystems (estuaries, mangroves, coral reefs, etc) are welcome.
Human activities are continuously changing worldwide the fluxes of chemicals and materials in the land-river-ocean continua. Current industrial, urban, and rural activities add an excessive amount of nutrients, metals, organic compounds, plastics, gases, minerals, and other materials to soil, rivers, and overall aquatic systems, creating contamination and acute episodes in estuaries and coastal zones. This disturbs the biota (pollution) leading to an unbalanced ecology alteration of the food chain. As a consequence, this also impacts economic and social activities culminating in the disruption of established (nutrient) cycles. The extension of how these contaminant fluxes impact the oceans, from the smaller to the largest estuaries, is still uncertain, mainly from a seasonal, tidal, multidisciplinary and global point of view despite several governmental and academic efforts.
It is increasingly reported that climatic changes impact directly water cycles in a way not seen before, including on the transport of contaminants along the land-water nexus. Therefore, not only the rise of contaminants and pollutants must be researched, but how they are carried and how they interact with the ocean in the different coastal ecosystems. Estuaries from low to high latitudes have been impacted and the associated ecosystems (coral reefs, mangroves, etc) and species have been endangered because of the lack of water and sediments quality or even because of effects of salinization or desalinization. Besides, new chemicals and materials are produced every day and to understand their origin, behavior, and fate are crucial to properly managing their impact in the oceans.
The goal of this Research Topic is to collect different works that disclose not only the concentration of contaminants and pollutants in the coastal zone but their fluxes and possible interactions with geology, physics, and/or biology. We hope to produce an important volume that updates the discussion regarding the fluxes of contaminants and pollutants in the land-ocean continua from small to large rivers bringing state-of-art papers. Temporal and multidisciplinary studies that address different ecosystems (estuaries, mangroves, coral reefs, etc) are welcome.