Dear Colleagues,

Pesticides comprise a powerful tool in agriculture, used to satisfy the worldwide need for food. Authorities establish regulations and guidelines regarding the authorization, use, and monitoring of pesticides to protect the environment and ensure human safety. However, the indiscriminate misuse of these chemicals raises a special concern regarding the levels that occur in the environment and the degree that their occurrence, in total, endangers the safety of our ecosystem. The pesticides’ fate and behavior in the environment depends on several parameters such as their physicochemical properties, the agricultural practice applied, the meteorological conditions, biotic processes and others. Simulation models are used to predict the environmental concentrations, which are subsequently used for the ecotoxicological risk assessment and eventually for the establishment of safe regulatory limits. In addition to this, there is an increased interest in the use of available monitoring data of pesticides in the environment for the performance of the risk assessment and management.

This Special Issue aims to solicit original contributions providing data on the occurrence of pesticides’ residues in soil, sediment, groundwater, surface water, air and biota. The editors encourage submissions that apply different fate models to the calculations or predict environmental concentrations and submissions regarding the identification and quantification of pesticides and their (bio)transformation products in the relevant environmental compartments with high resolution analytical methods. Finally, contributions on the use of monitoring data in the environmental risk assessment and the regulatory procedure for pesticides are welcome. The scope of submission includes original research and review articles on the theme.

Prof. Dr. Nikolaos S. Thomaidis
Dr. NIki Maragou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Herbicides
• Insecticides
• Plant protection products
• Transformation products
• Fate models
• Predicted Environmental Concentrations
• Risk Assessment
• (High resolution) mass spectrometry
• Environmental impact
• Policy makers