Sustainable Approach for Clean Environment through Phytoremediation

Dear Colleagues,

The raising of environmental awareness and the willingness to rely on Nature-Based Solutions enhance the importance of phytoremediation. Phytoremediation, or in other words, the use of higher plants to clean up and revegetate contaminated sites such as water, soil, sediments, and the air is an important part of the new field of green engineering. Phytoremediation leads to the mitigation of the advancing climate changes, and their use in urbanized areas improves the ecosystem functions. Individual remediation processes may indicate the effectiveness and tolerance of the plant to specific pollutants (eg. hyperaccumulators of heavy metals or rare earth elements) or cause stress-related response features results with species wilt. Recently, special attention has been focused on the processes taking place in the rhizosphere and the introduction of additives to increase the efficiency of the phytoremediation process. Nevertheless, there is still a need to expand knowledge on the processes, pathways, and capabilities of species specific to a given climatic condition, phytoremediation technologies planning, as well as analysis of the possibilities of using biomass after the performed treatments.

Potential topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Phytoremediation of soils, sediments, surface waters, and wastewaters
• Potentially toxic elements uptake and metabolism in plants
• Phytoremediation of emergent contaminants
• Recovery of nutrients and useful elements by plants
• Influencing of stress factors on phytoremediation process
• Chelators, biochar, and microbes use for phytoremediation efficiency enhance
• Value-added products produced with plants
• Management and planning of phytoremediation processes
• Ecological engineering methods and systems such as constructed wetlands, floating treatment islands, green walls, etc.

Original scientific contributions (case studies, experiments) and state-of-the-art reviews that describe recent advances concerning these topics and closely related areas are welcome.

This Special Issue focuses on diverse aspects related to phytoremediation at all, therefore the published research papers will bridge the gaps and shine new light on processes as well as the application of unrecognized plant species and emerging contaminants in the aspects of environmental protection.

Dr. Nicole Nawrot
Prof. Dr. Ewa Wojciechowska
Dr. Shahabaldin Rezania
Guest Editors

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