Impact of Soil Contaminants on Plant Physiology and Crop Productivity

Environmental stresses are now more severe due to climatic changes. Globally, numerous abiotic stresses affect soil and plants, hindering plant quality and productivity. To enhance plant yield and quality, it is crucial to understand how changes in the soil's physical and chemical properties impact plant production. Plants have evolved mechanisms to cope with environmental stresses within specific limits. Analyzing soil properties, observing plant responses, and considering various physicochemical factors are essential for understanding these stress tolerance mechanisms. Heavy metals, microplastic pollution, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other organic and inorganic contaminants have caused significant alterations in agricultural soil. Soil is a non-renewable natural resource that must be managed carefully to achieve sustainable agricultural production. However, agricultural activities contribute to increasing soil contamination levels, which are often harmful to soil health. Contamination from these stressors has resulted in adverse changes in soil profiles, metabolomics profiling of crops, and can also affect the physiological activities of crops. The soil environment has deteriorated due to the cumulative inhibitory impacts of these factors, damaging agricultural productivity and ecosystem health.

This Research Topic aims to explore the effects of various contaminants on soil and plant systems, focusing on their impacts on plant physiology and responses. It will also investigate nutrient management in contaminated soils and examine the interactive effects on crop physiology and productivity. Additional goals include assessing and validating new analytical methods for detecting contaminants and exploring innovative remediation strategies such as bioremediation and phytoremediation. Furthermore, this topic will delve into crop genomics, gene editing for contaminant resistance, and the role of plant-microbe interactions in soil health.

To gather further insights into the complex interactions between soil contaminants and plant systems, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Studies on soil contaminants that influence crops, focusing on the effects of potentially toxic elements in the soil-plant system

• The interactive effects of soil contamination on crop physiological responses and its counter-effects on productivity

• Assessment, validation, and application of novel analytical methods to detect contaminants in soil and crops

• Risk assessments of different soil contaminants and stress-related treatments in crops

• Interactions between soil contaminants and crops

Please note that purely descriptive articles without significant analytical or experimental insights will not be accepted.