Additional information
by Ilaria Guagliardi (Guest Editor)
The importance of studying pollution via potentially toxic elements (PTEs) is becoming a key challenge considering the increasing concern about the presence of PTEs in the environment and their potential impacts on ecosystem functioning and public health due to their persistence and biotoxicity.
Regional geochemical research, together with geostatistical computations which are used to identify source patterns of different pollutants related to the underlying geological features and/or anthropogenic activities, is the best approach for characterizing this pollution issue.
The collection of research in this Special Issue, "Potentially Toxic Element Pollution in Urban and Suburban Environments", represents the need of the scientific community to characterize the behavior, transport, fate, and ecotoxicological state of PTEs in environmental matrices in both urban and suburban settings. All the case studies collected are of relevant significance due to their quality, both in the methodologies and the achieved results, and interest to different environmental studies, from China to South Africa to Europe.
My role as Guest Editor of this Special Issue was exciting and stimulating. I would like to express my appreciation to all the authors for submitting their original contributions and to the reviewers for their essential role in the process. I would like to thank the editors of Toxics and, in particular, Selena Li for her precious and tireless support.
