Dear Colleagues,

The demand for food, fiber and biofuel to supply a growing population has led to the intensification of the input requirement by agriculture. Some environmental counter effects and the necessity to reduce cost production made the rational use of inputs become a goal of managers and decision makers.

Global awareness of environmental issues has increased and become a theme approached by consumers and policy making, used as an international trade barrier and even propitiated the creation new market niches.

Environmental evaluation on agricultural production systems is approached in many ways. However, a complete quantitative assessment requires time and effort, which, in most of cases, resulted in limited studies in terms of environmental impact.

To supply subsidies to the environmental awareness it was necessary to adopt a wider and systemic approach. This is because the high complexity of biosystems requires managers to deal with controllable (e.g., inputs, energy) and non-controllable, but predictable (e.g., weather, market) aspects that directly affect agricultural production systems. Data collection and treatment to subsidize decision making became vital.

Historically, agricultural engineering has played an important role on designing of farm assets, propitiating adequate management for the production system of crops, forests and livestock, aiming for higher efficiency of production processes. The most recent technological development has provided several hardware and software options able to make data acquisition easier. Therefore, there are opportunities to used data from the digitalization process of agriculture to support managers.

Technological options are rapidly growing, which can contribute for monitoring and further improvement of the current systems.

The demand for innovative and less impacting solutions to minimize the environmental footprint of vegetable and animal production will be continuously required.

This Special Issue centers on novel trends in environmental footprints to highlight the solutions performed and which path should be followed to achieve higher efficiency of agricultural and biological systems. All types of manuscript submissions are welcomed and will follow a rigorous peer-review process.

We are looking forward to an extraordinary Special Issue, displaying trends on environmental aspects to become part of decision making.

Prof. Thiago Libório Romanelli
Guest Editor

• Energy footprint 
• Carbon footprint 
• Water footprint 
• Life Cycle Assessment 
• Sustainability 
• Systems management 
• Agricultural technology 
• Smart farming 
• Digital farming 
• Precision agriculture