The Role of Nutrients in Crop Performance Under Biotic and Abiotic Stresses
A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Soil and Plant Nutrition".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 May 2026
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant ecophysiology; plant–pathogen interactions; environmental contamination and restoration; genotype X–environment interactions; soil health; plant protection
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: crop valorization; genotype X–environment interactions; micronutrients; mineral deficiency; nanofertilization; plant nutrition
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Mineral nutrition has been central to agronomy since the first experiments demonstrating that essential elements govern plant growth and yield. Over the past few decades, research has moved from descriptive deficiency and toxicity charts to a mechanistic view of how nutrients shape plant physiology, development, and interactions with the environment. Drought, heat, salinity, flooding, cold, ozone, and biotic pressures impose concurrent constraints on crops, and tolerance often hinges on nutrient-enabled processes such as osmotic adjustment, redox homeostasis, membrane stability, hormonal signaling, and crosstalk with the microbiome.
This Special Issue will showcase how mineral nutrients drive crop tolerance to environmental stress under field and controlled conditions. We invite studies that connect nutrient supply, uptake, transport, and partitioning with measurable stress tolerance outcomes at the organ, plant, and cropping system levels. We particularly welcome research that translates mechanistic insights into agronomic management, breeding targets, and decision support for sustainable production, especially as it relates to the following:
- Nutrient mediated priming against abiotic and biotic stress;
- Quantitative links between nutrient stoichiometry and stress physiology;
- Nutrient interactions with plant associated microbes;
- Precision and site-specific fertilization under climate variability;
- Novel inputs including chelates and nano-enabled formulations;
- High-throughput phenotyping combined with robust statistics and modeling;
- Data-rich field trials that quantify tolerance, yield stability, and resource use efficiency.
For this Special Issue, we welcome original research that links nutrients to stress tolerance from gene to field, including multi-season and multi-location trials, reviews and mini-reviews that synthesize mechanisms and management options across crops and stresses; perspectives that frame emerging questions and practical implications for farmers and breeders; methods and data notes that enable reproducible nutrient and stress assays, imaging, or analytics; and meta analyses and modeling studies that integrate heterogeneous datasets to guide nutrient management under stress.
Dr. Marta Nunes da Silva
Dr. Carla Sofia Sancho Dos Santos
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- nutrient use efficiency
- micronutrients
- stress tolerance
- priming
- nanofertilizers
- crop protection
- precision fertilization
- sustainable farming
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