Non-Equilibrium Processes in Earth and Environmental Systems: Dynamics, Feedbacks, and Modeling Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

Earth and environmental systems are inherently dynamic and often operate far from thermodynamic or dynamic equilibrium. External forcings, such as solar radiation, human activities, natural variability and stochastic processes, continuously drive these systems away from a steady state, resulting in complex, nonlinear, and often abrupt responses. Understanding non-equilibrium phenomena is crucial for predicting system behavior, assessing resilience, and informing sustainable management practices.

This Special Issue invites original research articles, reviews, and perspectives that investigate non-equilibrium processes across varied Earth and environmental science domains, with a focus on their underlying mechanisms, feedbacks, spatiotemporal dynamics, and model-data integrated approaches, including those leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Topics of Interest:

• Global and Local Temperature Fluctuations and Energy Imbalances: radiative forcing and Earth’s energy budget, global or local temperature variability across at various time scales, etc.
• Theoretical frameworks for non-equilibrium phenomena in environmental sciences: nonlinear response theory and fluctuation relations methods.
• Climate Extremes and Tipping Points: regime shifts in climate and ecological systems, critical transitions and early warning signals in non-equilibrium systems, abrupt changes in Earth system components (e.g., plant mortality, forest-savanna-grassland transition; permafrost thaw, and ice sheet collapse).
• Hydrological, Geophysical and Ecohydrological Processes: nonlinear interactions between water, energy, and vegetation, land–atmosphere feedback, statistical–mechanical treatment of geophysical models, transient responses of hydro-ecological systems to droughts and floods, soil biogeochemical cycles (C, N, P), and soil-carbon dynamics under land-use and climate change.
• Modeling Non-equilibrium Systems: advanced numerical and conceptual models capturing non-equilibrium dynamics, applications of AI, machine learning, and data-driven approaches for understanding and predicting non-equilibrium phenomena.

Dr. Jun Yin
Dr. Matteo Colangeli
Dr. Kailiang Yu
Dr. Bei Gao
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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. Entropy 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.