Monitoring Soil Contamination by Remote Sensors

Dear Colleagues,

For about two centuries, the industrial revolution and associated demographic growth have led to increased environmental contamination by various chemical compounds related to human activities. Industrial and mining activities have notably been at the origin of legacy soil contamination by, e.g., metals, PCB or hydrocarbons.

Depending on their toxicity and persistence in the environment, chemical contaminants can alter the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils and raise ecosystem and human health concerns. Over the last few decades, promising solutions based on remote sensing have emerged for monitoring contaminant release, fate and effects on soils and plants, from the field to higher scale applications. A wide variety of approaches coupling sensor-based data to plant and soil sciences have been proposed for detecting and assessing soil contamination directly or indirectly, opening the way to surveying contaminated areas and characterizing the impacts of anthropogenic activities on the environment.

This Special Issue aims to publish original research that specifically addresses various aspects of soil contamination monitoring over space and time using passive (multi- and hyperspectral, reflective or emissive spectral domains) and/or active (LiDAR, RADAR) remote sensing. We invite a wide range of contributions from methodological to applied and multidisciplinary research about the following (nonexclusive) topics:

• Direct detection of chemical contamination via its impacts on soil properties;
• Indirect detection of soil chemical contamination based on variation of vegetation health and associated traits (e.g., biochemical, structural, phenological, morphological);
• Use of radiative transfer models, machine or deep learning algorithms, and other processing tools to discriminate chemical stress from other biotic and abiotic stresses;
• Assessment of soil properties related to contaminant mobility, uptake, translocation, and accumulation in plant tissues;
• Quantification of chemical contaminant concentrations in soils;
• Integrative approaches for the upscaling of measures on leaf or soil samples to images at the landscape scale;
• Monitoring of contaminated, remediated or restored areas (vegetated and non-vegetated), e.g., industrial or urban brownfields, phytomanaged sites;
• Fusion of multimodal or multitemporal images giving access to new parameters to improve detection and/or quantification accuracy.

For this Special Issue, laboratory, greenhouse, and field approaches can be considered. Studies can focus on any kind of chemical contaminant (e.g., metals, hydrocarbons, pesticides, PCB, explosive derivatives). Reviews covering one or more topics are welcome.

Dr. Arnaud Elger
Dr. Guillaume Lassalle
Dr. Sophie Fabre
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2700 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.