Special Section 2022 - Applied Botany for Sustainability

Sustainable development goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all people and the world by 2030". They were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly (UN-GA). See further details at https://sdgs.un.org/goals. Those goals are:

To fulfill some of the sustainable development goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals) such as SDG2 Zero Hunger, SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG12 Responsible Consumption and Production at least partially, the potential of plants need to be fully developed and exploited. With this special section, we offer the opportunity to demonstrate how applied botany contributes to these goals.

Suitable topics

In general, every topic that uses botany to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals is welcome. Sustainable plant cultivation techniques, either technology-based and environmentally balanced, such as urban farming, recirculating systems, agroforestry, or simple and effective nature-based solutions could contribute by exploiting the full potential of plants. These include cultivation on any scale, from single households over micro-business to mega farms, as well as any plant products, including food, fodder, medicinal plants, fuel and energy production and commodities for industrial production such as starch, oils, volatiles, and so on. The focus could be on the optimization of product quality and quantity but also on saving of resources of any kind (energy, water, space, labor, fertilizer …).
In addition, effective or gentle harvesting regimes and techniques, novel storage solutions for plant commodities to reduce spoilage and biomass waste valorization are of interest.
Aside from cultivation practices and agricultural production systems, also landscape management, underutilized or neglected plant resources as well as biodiversity conservation can be addressed.
Also manuscripts investigating the potential of plants to solve contamination issues or to thrive despite contamination are fitting for the special section. These could involve plant cultivation on saline soils, the use of wastewater for irrigation, the use of plants in constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment, heavy metal contaminated soils, radiation contamination, air pollution, all aspects of phytoremediation and many more.
If you have a certain topic in mind that is not listed above, feel free to ask one of the editors-in-chief about its suitability.

Manuscript requirements

We accept original research papers with a clear focus on one of the topics above. Further, on, review papers that evaluate recent literature and metastudies are welcome.
Papers and reviews should contain a clear reference to the sustainable development goals. Ideally, you pick one of the goals as lead motivation and include a paragraph on how your research is contributing to reach that goal. The respective goal icon will be printed into the final article.
Apart from that, all standard requirements to manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Applied Botany and Food Quality apply.
When choosing a section during the submission process, please choose "SPECIAL 2022 – Applied Botany for Sustainability".

Timeline

Submission is open until August 31, 2022. All manuscripts that are submitted to this special section and pass the peer-review process successfully will be published this year. There is no definite publication date. As soon as a manuscript production is finished, the article will appear online.

We especially invite presenters from the symposium “Applied Botany for Sustainability” at this year’s International Conference of the German Society for Plant Sciences, to hand in a manuscript to this special section until August 31, 2022.

First come, first serve. The first manuscripts that arrive will be reviewed first and will be published as soon as the review and production process is finished. There is no waiting time for publication for the section to be complete.

Publication Fee

The usual publication fee applies, which is 400€ (incl. VAT).
Contributions from countries that are listed as low-income economies in the lending group classification in the World Bank Index receive a 100% discount. No publication charges are raised in this case. Contributions from countries that are listed as lower-middle-income economies receive a 40% discount, lowering the publication fee to 260€.
For members of the German Society for Quality Research on Plant Foods and the Section Applied Botany of the German Society for Plant Sciences (DBG), no publications fees are raised. Those are included in their annual society membership fee.

Symposium “Applied botany for sustainability” at this year’s International Conference of the German Society for Plant Sciences

Information coming soon. See also https://www.deutsche-botanische-gesellschaft.de/en/about-us/conferences/botanik-tagung