Isotopic & Nuclear Techniques in Studying (Agro)environmental Processes

Dear Colleagues，

Environmental resource degradation from erosion, contamination, and salinization are among the most critical and rapidly growing constraints for the sustainable management of agroecosystems, threatening food security. Modern, long-term sustainable strategies and approaches to mitigate such degradation processes are based on the prompt and accurate detection and application of specific remediation or conservation measures. Both stable and radioactive isotopic tracer studies have shown their potential for monitoring and better understanding of environmental (e.g., erosion, sub/surface runoff, leaching, contamination) as well as physiological processes of crops (e.g., nutrients/toxic elements cycle, water cycle, evapotranspiration, photosynthesis). The principles of isotopic techniques are based on the spatiotemporal tracing of the movement and transformation of specific isotopes across the subcellular, microscopic, ecosystem, and regional scales.

Stable isotope techniques have been recognized as very powerful empirical tools for the advanced elucidation of plant–environment interactions. Water and nutrient management are very important to increasing crop yield. Improved nutrient and water use efficiency are among the major requirements to achieve sustainable land management. Therefore, stable isotopes are very important tools for measuring the nutrient uptake from various sources for studying the processes that influence the efficiency of the applied fertilizers and irrigation, tracing the fate of fertilizers and water fractions not used by crops, and developing irrigation and fertigation practices minimizing the losses of nutrients and water.

Fallout radionuclides (FRNs) are used for evaluating short- to long‐term soil erosion and deposition processes to complement modelling and conventional measurement methods.

Recently, the detection and monitoring of some environmental processes (erosion, soil moisture regime, salinization) have become instant and accurate due to significant improvements to sensors/detectors and integration with remote sensing and IoT solutions. Such combinations of advanced techniques enable the processing of large datasets and the analysis of numerous studies conducted under variable conditions (e.g., meta-analyses), while the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms enables the testing of various scenarios under different climate conditions. Therefore, multidisciplinary approaches (e.g., isotopic and nuclear techniques combined and upgraded with hydropedological, physiological, and molecular methods) to address challenges in agroenvironmental research will provide more holistic and proactive solutions for agroecosystems management.

For this Special Issue, we welcome all manuscript types (original studies, reviews, communications, opinions, perspectives, discussions) that show novelty on topics including, but not limited to, the listed keywords.

Prof. Dr. Gabrijel Ondrasek 
Dr. Emil Fulajtar
Prof. Dr. Branko Petrinec
Guest Editors

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