Fate and Transport of Contaminants in Soil and Groundwater Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The availability, quality, and quantity of water resources are going to be one of the most important problems that humankind has to face in the decades to come. In that context, human activities (urban, industrial, and/or agriculture) may release a growing amount of new substances into the environment, and put soils and both surface and groundwater resources at risk. One the best-known example is water pollution by pesticides, which are directly applied to crops. On the other hand, there are hundreds of other chemicals that are not considered in routine sampling campaigns and have the potential to endanger soil and water systems. Among, these contaminants, there has been a growing interest over the last decade in “emerging pollutants”, which have acquired significance once the improvement of analytical techniques has enabled their detection and quantification at trace levels. It is a wide group, which includes surfactants, pharmaceuticals products, fragrances, sun-screen agents, insect repellents, etc. As consequence, presence of new chemicals in soil and water media has been widely reported by the scientific community over the last few decades. Such a situation creates a serious risk to public health and the environment; and research efforts are necessary to know the distribution and the behaviour of these compounds, to understand the extent of contamination, final fate, and possible transport to soil and groundwater in order to define water management strategies and actions required to reduce the risk.

This Special Issue wants to capture attention of this problem, and is devoted to new studies dealing with presence, behaviour, final fate, modeling, and/or remediation of contaminants in soil and groundwater systems. The scope of this Special Issue embraces a range of topics, including experimental investigations of contaminant sorption, degradation processes, diffusion, contaminant decay, transport in the unsaturated, and saturated zones; field experiments and new techniques of soil restoration; and new tools and strategies to monitor soils and groundwater pollution.

Dr. Carmen Corada-Fernández
Dr. Javier Valdes-Abellan
Prof. Dr. Lucila Candela
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-anonymized 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.