Environmental Monitoring and Assessment - Special Issue: Recent Technological Advances in Bio-sensors for Soil and Plant Monitoring
The mounting global population has put a dramatic demand on food production and supply sectors. Mismanagement of the resources and unthoughtful human activities has deteriorated the soil and atmospheric quality that had led to adverse climatic conditions, poor soil quality, drought, flood, salinity, and novel plant diseases. These together had put an enormous stress for agriculture and food security. 'Smart' and ' Precision agriculture' has emerged as an appropriate and promising way to meet food need with optimized usage of agrochemicals and water. Bio-sensors are the principal element to establish precise and sustainable agriculture. Bio-sensors provide vital information on soil & field conditions and plant health by converting biological signals into measurable units/forms.
Different sensors are employed to gain soil quality related information and are often in conjunction with real time monitoring and GPS. Due to shortcomings like rapidity, lacks of algorithms to optimize variable factors like fertilizers and pesticides in these 'on the go sensors'; mapping based automated sensors are adopted. It is an integrated system comprised of different sensors like electromagnetic, airflow, mechanical and optical sensors to gain insights on salinity, moisture, pH, organic content and texture. Bio-sensors are made of microbes / microbial products-based sensors that are incorporated with physical signal transducers to detect and monitor for the presence of potential toxins like Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals, to predict soil nutrients, organic content and moisture. Advancements are being made to make it automatic and apposite for real time analysis. For this purpose, these sensors are being designed to produce optical signals like fluorescence, colorimetric and bioluminescence. Bio-sensors are adopted to monitor various plant stresses and fitness associated with poor growth conditions. PCR, culture and colony counting, molecular imprinted polymers, fluorescence, chemiluminesence, chromatographic, immunological techniques, palmonic nano-sensors techniques are being used detect physical and biological contaminants and fitness of the plants. Major drawbacks in these existing techniques are brought in by lack of versatility, rapidity, reproducibility and cost. Nano-inspired biosensor has emerged as an advanced trend to plant monitoring. Here, the biosensors are integrated with nanotechnology-based products like nanotubes, nanowires, etc. that promise rapid and ultra-sensitive detection along with reproducibility. In addition, genetically encoded nano-sensors enabled with fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) are also being applied. Innovations for automatism of these procedures would further make it more economical; however appropriate algorithms for data optimization are needed to be made. This special issue discusses the various advancements in the sensor techniques to monitor soil and plant with emphasis on biosensors.
List of Topics (include, but not limited to the following):
• Advantages of biosensors for precision agriculture
• Innovations in nano-inspired biosensors for crop monitoring
• Present and future prospective for biosensor-based pathogen detection in plants
• Ecological significances of biosensors based smart agriculture
• Biosensor based soil pollution detection, monitoring and control
• Biosensor merged imaging and spectroscopic approaches for plant health
• Bio-sensors enabled real time monitoring techniques for soil assessment
• Recent advantages and challenges of biosensor-based plant stress diagnosis
• Biosensor for optimization of variable factors of the soil in next-generation agriculture
• Economic potential and implementation strategies for successful implementation of biosensor to study plant health
Important Dates:
Manuscript Submissions Deadline: 25.06.2022
Notification to Authors: 05.07.2022
Deadline for revision submissions: 10.10.2022
Notification of final decisions: 30.12.2022
Guest Editor Details:
Dr. Ahmed A. Abd El-Latif
Associate professor,
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
Faculty of Science,
Menoufia University,
Shebin El-Koom, Egypt
alatif@science.menofia.edu.eg
Dr. Edmond Shu-lim Ho
Senior Lecturer,
Department of Computer and Information Sciences,
Northumbria University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
e.ho@northumbria.ac.uk
Dr. Jialiang Peng
Associate professor,
School of Data Science and Technology,
Heilongjiang University,
Harbin, China
jialiangpeng@hlju.edu.cn