Special Issue "Environmental Pollution & Climate Change: Responses of Plant Organisms to Harsh Environments"
A special issue of Stresses (ISSN 2673-7140). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant and Photoautotrophic Stresses".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2022 | Viewed by 7730
Special Issue Editors

Interests: essential oils; bioactive phytochemicals; ethnopharmacology; antimicrobial resistance; one health; food security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Interests: photosynthesis and photoprotection under stress; plant tissue optics; role of secondary metabolites in plant stress tolerance
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: epigenetics and abiotic/biotic stresses; plant breeding under abiotic and biotic stresses; breeding for weed management; relationships between wild relatives and cultivated species
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In their environment, plants have to cope with a plethora of adverse and stressful conditions due to extreme meteorological events, temperature fluctuations, drought, flooding, UV and high solar radiation, organic and inorganic pollutants, etc. Anthropogenic inputs are largely responsible for climate change. Over the past century, human activities have released huge amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels into the environment, thus affecting plant health and distribution. As sessile organisms, plants are not able to escape from a changing milieu, and they have therefore evolved an array of strategies to defend themselves from a wide range of stressors. In other words, the evolutionary success of plants has depended on their genotypic/phenotypic plasticity, resilience, and metabolic diversity.
In this very wide context, we invite investigators to submit both original research and review articles that explore all these aspects, in open and/or confined environments.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Global change biology
- Air and soil pollution
- Tropospheric ozone
- Xenobiotics
- Heavy metals
- Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs)
- Secondary metabolism and metabolites
- Chemical ecology
- Ecotoxicology
- Loss of biodiversity
Prof. Dr. Marcello Iriti
Prof. Dr. Georgios Liakopoulos
Dr. Eleni Tani
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. Stresses is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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.
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Plant-metal interactions in the context of climate change: a review
Denise R. Fernando1,2
1 Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic 3086, Australia.
2 Department of Animal Plant and Soil Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic 3086, Australia.
ABSTRACT: Expanding fundamental understanding of the complex and far-reaching impacts of anthropogenic climate change is essential for formulating mitigation strategies. There is abundant evidence of ongoing damage and threat to plant health across both natural and cultivated ecosystems, with potentially immeasurable cost to humanity and the health of the planet. Plant-soil systems are multi-faceted, incorporating key variables that are individually and interactively affected by climatic factors such as rainfall, solar radiation, air temperature, atmospheric CO2 and pollution. This review focuses on climate effects on plant-metal interactions and related plant-soil dynamics. For example, while ecosystems native to metalliferous soils incorporate vegetation well adapted to metal oversupply, climate-change can induce the oversupply of certain immobile soil metals by altering the chemistry of non-metalliferous soils. The latter is implicated in observed stress in some non-metal adapted forest trees growing on ‘normal’ non-metalliferous soils. Vegetation native to riverine habitats reliant on flooding is increasingly at risk under drying conditions caused by anthropogenic water removal and climate change, which can ultimately limit plant access to essential trace-metal nutrients from nutrient poor sandy soils. In agricultural plant systems it is well known that environmental conditions are capable of altering soil chemistries and plant responses to drive plant metal toxicity stress. These aspects will be discussed with respect to specific studies linking climate to plant-metal interactions.