Potentially Toxic Elements Pollution in Urban and Suburban Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Pollution by potentially toxic elements (PTEs) is becoming a serious and widespread issue in all environmental matrices because of accelerated population growth rate, rapid industrialization and urbanization and other changes, which have occurred in most parts of the world in the last few decades. The increasingly worrying concern about the presence of PTEs in the environment has attracted considerable attention due to their potential impacts on ecosystem functioning and on public health because of their persistence and biotoxicity. PTEs can in fact be transferred into the human body as a consequence of dermal contact, inhalation and ingestion through the food chain and drinking water. Unfortunately, PTEs are ubiquitous in all environmental compartments, and they have been widely detected worldwide. In this context, environmental geochemistry and related subjects are elected matters to investigate, characterise and reveal the patterns of inorganic elements together with geostatistical computations that are used to identify source patterns of different pollutants related to underlying geological features and/or anthropogenic activities.

The present Special Issue would like to collect and compare case studies worldwide on behaviour, transport, fate and ecotoxicological state of PTEs in environmental matrices in both urban and suburban settings.

The topics of interest, on which authors are invited and welcome to submit original research papers, reviews and short communications, include but are not limited to the following keywords: potentially toxic elements (PTEs); environmental geochemistry; soil, sediment, water, air pollution; geogenic and anthropogenic pollutant input; bioavailability; PTEs mapping; spatial data analysis.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Ilaria Guagliardi

Guest Editor