Geochemical Environmental Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Geochemical environmental monitoring is living through an explosive uprising with respect to importance and potentiality. Every day researchers all over the world are offering to the world the availability of new and ever-more-refined technology and methodology to investigate the health of our planet. Unfortunately, these high potential tools are often completely unknown by law and environmental control agencies. These entities suffer a heavy delay in gaining research innovations and indications that can cause misunderstandings in grasping the real characteristics of natural environments, and, consequently, affecting the efficiency of controls in term of recognition of contamination processes.

In fact, every anthropogenic activity, including the production processes in industrial plants and power plants, as well as the disposal of waste materials, that may cause significant environmental impacts on the surroundings can be fingerprinted by appropriate chemical and isotopic characterization. The lack of detailed information about the several potential contamination sources can partially blind investigator eyes, causing a loss of capacity to trace and quantify contamination events. Moreover, upon release into the environment, the polluting substance is quickly dispersed through transport processes, such as circulation of air masses and advection in groundwater and surface waters. Consequently, it can travel considerable distances from the source. In addition, in areas strongly affected by human activities, there are multiple contamination sources and it is fundamental to assess the provenance of a given polluting substance, for the correct application of the Polluter Pays Principle, a well-known environmental policy requiring that the costs of pollution be borne by those who cause it.

The classical chemical interpretation, based on both the analysis of a large number of substances in different geo-environmental matrices, and the comparison of analytical data with maximum admissible concentrations, represents a necessary and preliminary step. However, it is not enough to assess contamination sources. Fingerprinting techniques integrating chemical and isotopic data have to be applied, together with geochemical and biogeochemical modeling, to highlight active processes and to establish the provenance of polluting substances.

This Special Issue solicits contributions on geochemical environmental monitoring studies of different environmental matrices (air, soil and water) focus on fingerprinting of the source of contaminant, and methodology and techniques to follow the path and the fate of the pollution events.

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. Geosciences 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 1800 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.

• Geochemical and isotopic monitoring of different environmental matrices
• Contamination assessment in different anthropogenic site
• Experience in geochemical environmental forensics
• Evaluation of geochemical baseline
• Origin and evolution of pollutants linked to natural and anthropogenic source
• Methodological protocol focus on contaminants fingerprinting