Soil ecosystems provide essential services, including nutrient cycling, water filtration, carbon sequestration, and habitat provision. However, industrial activities, intensive agriculture, mining, urbanization, and waste disposal have led to widespread accumulation of contaminants in soils globally.
From legacy pollutants such as potentially toxic elements and persistent organic pollutants to contaminants of emerging concern, soil contamination poses a growing threat to terrestrial biodiversity and agricultural productivity.
While extensive research has documented contaminant concentrations in soils, significant knowledge gaps remain regarding how pollutants alter fundamental belowground ecosystem processes and soil functioning, thereby affecting major processes on an ecosystem level. Contaminant mixtures, dynamic environmental conditions, and climate change stressors alter contaminant bioavailability, bioaccumulation pathways, and ecotoxicological impacts on microbial communities, soil fauna and vegetation. Furthermore, developing scalable, cost-effective, and ecologically sound remediation and management strategies requires a deep mechanistic understanding of soil-pollutant interactions and physiological responses of plants.
This session aims to bring together contributions from all aspects of soil pollution research, including methodological advances focused on the sources, distribution, ecological impacts, and sustainable management of soil pollutants.
We encourage interdisciplinary contributions that link physical and chemical pollutant characterization with plant responses, ecosystem function assessment, and novel remediation frameworks. Studies on the effects of soil pollution on ecosystem processes and biogeochemical cycles (e.g., carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus dynamics) under pollution pressure are especially welcome, as are novel insights into processes governing bioavailability, trophic transfer, and soil-to-plant contaminant accumulation.
We welcome presentations of laboratory and field research results as well as theoretical studies. We intend to bring together scientists from multiple disciplines. We especially encourage young researchers to submit their contributions.