Environmental journals: open calls for papers

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Environmental Science

The past decade has seen a huge growth in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches being applied to challenges in chemical science. These approaches are powerful tools for improving our understanding of the environment to build a cleaner, safer, more sustainable and equitable planet. This special collection of Environmental Science: Advances welcomes all studies that use AI and ML to advance our understanding of the physical environment, environmental health, and environmental sustainability, or to provide solutions to challenges in these areas. 

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Environmental Photocatalysis in the context of Carbon Neutralisation

Technologies development for realizing carbon neutrality are the key to build a sustainable society. Using renewable energy to carry out production activities and environmental pollution control is an important way to realize carbon neutralization. Among them, photocatalysis can use solar energy for photosynthesis, photolysis of water and degradation of environmental pollutants. It is regarded as an important technology to solve the energy and environmental crisis. Despite decades of development, photocatalytic technology still has many key scientific problems to be solved, including the bottleneck of large-scale application in environmental pollution control, the utilization efficiency of sunlight, the selectivity of products in photosynthesis and so on. The collection will publish research on environmental photocatalysis in the context of carbon neutralization. Fundamental and applied research papers covering multidisciplinary topics, as well as review papers with new perspectives will be considered.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Photocatalysis for pollutants treatment in water, air
2. Photocatalysis for pollutants utilization
3. Photocatalysis for CO2 reduction
4. Photocatalysis for energy conversion
5. Solar water splitting, H2 production
6. Solar-driven seawater desalination
7. Photocatalysis for H2O2 production
8. Photosynthesis
9. Photoelectrocatalysis for environmental application
10. Role of photocatalysis in the fate of pollutants

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Methods for Early Warning of Chemicals of Emerging Concern

The term ‘chemicals of emerging concern’ refers to substances where there is a rising concern about their danger to both the environment and human health. Many of these have only recently been identified as a risk and so have not been regulated under national or international legislation. These chemicals can include micro/nano plastics, antibiotics, drugs, hormones and industrial additives. Therefore, early warning methods for these emerging chemicals which can reduce disaster risks are of paramount importance, with clear implications for policy.

This collection aims to highlight important emerging pollutants and increase our understanding of their transport, fate, and behaviour in the environment, as well as highlighting ‘early warning’ methods, and inspire future work in this area.

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Opportunities and Challenges of Using CRISPR Technologies in the Agri-Food Sector

CRISPR/ Cas genome editing is an advanced tool which has come to prominence over the past decade for crop improvement. It has been proven to be a highly successful biotechnological tool with enormous potential for the agri-food sector. Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges that need to be addressed including the need to quickly obtain transgene-free CRISPR for a wide range of plant species, concerns about the potential environmental impact and regulatory issues surrounding the use of this technology.

Despite these challenges, CRISPR/Cas technology offers great opportunities for crop improvement with the potential to enhance yields, improve disease resistance and reduce the need for harmful pesticides. In this special collection, we will showcase reviews and research papers that examine the opportunities and challenges of using CRISPR technologies in the agri-food sector.

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Tracking complex mixtures of chemicals in Human- and Eco-Exposome: the nexus of models, analytics, and toxicity

Presently, there are parallel efforts from both modeling and experimental areas seeking to identify and quantify the ecological and health risks of the vast number of chemicals, such as computational exposure science, computational toxicology, bioassay-based toxicity screening, non-target chemical analysis, analysis of mixtures and substances of unknown or variable composition and biologicals (UVCBs) or complex reaction products. This themed issue seeks contributions that reflect the state of the art and ongoing and future focus on evaluating the exposure and risk associated with tens of thousands of chemical contaminants. Also, it will look at human exposure in a broad perspective, encompassing the continuum from environment via food and drinking water to human exposure and effects. It aims to be open to both computational and experimental scientists willing to initiate a discussion on how these methodologies and techniques can be advanced and integrated for holistic, high-throughput evaluation of chemicals.

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Urban Stormwater Management

Examples of topics of interest for this collection include:

• Collection of data on stormwater quality, including the use of novel monitoring approaches and statistical methods to cope with the high spatial and temporal variability of stormwater discharges
• Investigation of stormwater pollution sources, use of building materials, and other source control options
• Reuse of stormwater in a context of increasing water scarcity, and methods to quantify potential health and environmental risks due to stormwater reuse actions
• Options for treatment of stormwater discharges, end-of-pipe solutions, including the use of Nature-Based Solutions, green technologies, and low-impact development
• Planning and placement of treatment options across the urban water infrastructure
• Planning of action(s) to avoid/reduce/manage pollution from stormwater discharges at the catchment/city scale (i.e., decision support tools development or application, participatory frameworks)
• Governance and policy frameworks for implementation and operation of pollution control and reduction actions, exploiting the available data and coping with the inherent uncertainty
• Integration of water analytics and digital solutions, different data sources, monitoring and modelling, to support the management of stormwater quality in the urban area

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