Bioremediation of Contaminated Soil in Agriculture

Dear colleagues,

While modern agriculture benefits  humankind by producing more crops and foods it has also led to contaminate agriculture lands with thousands of chemicals. Tonnes of pesticides, herbicides  and fungicides are used by farmers globally. In addition, fuel spills and other activities  involving  heavy machinery in modern agriculture have polluted agricultural lands with petroleum hydrocarbons. Many of these compounds enter the food chain and enter local groundwater, threatening lives and environments. It has been shown that many of these compounds are potentially harmful and hazardous, so there  is an urgent need to remove them from the  environment. 

Cleaning polluted agricultural soils offer unique challenges as the soil represents a valuable resource and approaches to removing the contaminant should allow the subsequent reuse of the soil. Currently there are a number of current techniques used too treat contaminated agricultural soils including physico-chemical and biological approaches (bioremediation). Physico-chemical methods are expensive, labour intense  and prone to secondary contaminations, making reuse often difficult to achieve. Bioremediation, or using microbes and other living organisms for  the  degradation or clean-up of pollution  is a promising technology in this regard. In recent years, the application of advanced techniques such as nanotechnology have also led to improvements the remediation efficiency. In addition the ability to investigate the diversity and activity of the soil microbial community using high throughput sequencing has revolutionised our understaning of the response of the microbial community to both contamination and treatment.

This Special Issue will focus on “Bioremediation of Contaminated Soil in Agriculture”. We welcome novel research, reviews and opinion pieces covering all related topics including remediation of agricultural soils contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, beneficial microorganisms in bioremediation, assessments of microbial communities in polluted agricultural lands, management solutions, modelling and case-studies from the field.

Prof. Dr. Andrew S. Ball
Dr. Esmaeil Shahsavari
Dr. Arturo Aburto Medina
Guest Editors

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