New Insights into the Environmental Behaviour and Toxicity of Critical and Strategic Metals in Aquatic Ecosystems

A special issue of Toxics (ISSN 2305-6304). This special issue belongs to the section "Metals and Radioactive Substances".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 November 2025 | Viewed by 11

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Département des Sciences Biologiques, Université du Québecà Montréal (UQAM), Montreal, QC H2X 1Y4, Canada
Interests: metal toxicity; metal detoxification; hyphenated techniques; mining activities; subcellular metal partitioning; environmental metallomics; aquatic environments; benthic organisms
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Institut des Sciences Analytiques et de Physico-Chimie pour l'Environnement et les Matériaux (IPREM), Universite de Pau et des Pays de L'Adour, Pau, France
Interests: metal behavior and fate in natural waters; comprehension of key processes driving metal accumulation in microalgae and mollusks; metal effects, including in mixture with organic contaminants, towards phytoplankton, biofilms and mollusks
College of Veterinary Medicine, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou 450002, China
Interests: animal toxicology and animal nutrition metabolic disease; toxicology of heavy metal; toxicology of mycotoxin
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The current energetic transition towards a low-carbon scenario requires, more than ever, large quantities of critical and strategic minerals (CSMs). This group of elements includes platinum group metals, rare earth elements, cobalt, nickel, gallium, germanium, indium, lithium, niobium, thallium, etc.. These elements may pose a real risk to aquatic ecosystems. However, our predictive tool for assessing toxic risks of these contaminants, some considered as emerging, remains limited, largely due to a crucial lack of environmental and toxicological knowledge. These limitations hamper the ability of environmental players to predict toxicological risks of these elements, which are already found in our waterways; for many of them, environmental regulation does not apply yet.

Given the importance of these topics, we invite you to submit original articles that deal with the environmental behaviour of CSM, their concentrations in difference matrices (water, sediment, air, and biota), their interaction with organisms (biodisponibility and bioaccumulation), and the toxicity related to the MSC exposure (single or in a mixture). Moreover, we welcome research carried out using conventional and cutting-edge approaches (e.g., omics) applied to experimental and field studies in order to provide crucial innovative and timely toxicological insights.

We look forward to your contributions.

Dr. Maikel Rosabal
Prof. Dr. Séverine Le Faucheur
Dr. Xu Yang
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. Toxics 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

  • critical and strategic minerals (CSMs)
  • environmental behavior
  • toxicological risk assessment
  • bioavailability and bioaccumulation
  • aquatic ecosystems
  • omics techniques

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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