Biotechnology in Environmental Monitoring and Pollution Abatement

In recent years, the demand for the use of sustainable and eco-friendly environmental processes is rapidly growing subjected to economic, public, and legislation pressure. Biotechnology provides a plethora of opportunities for effectively addressing issues pertaining to the monitoring, assessment, modeling, and treatment of contaminated water, air, and solid waste streams. In this context, source tracking of environmental pollutants and process modeling using biological based methods are becoming increasingly important, mainly owing to the accuracy and robustness of such techniques.The different biotechniques available nowadays, thus, represent both well-established and novel (bio)technologies, although several aspects of their performance are still to be tested. For instance, the use of novel biocatalysts and reactor designs, the understanding of microbial community dynamics andmechanisms occurring within a (bio)reactor, and the assessment of the performance of (bio)reactors during long-term operation and itsmodeling. If thesemechanisms are understood and the barriers are overcome, novel biotechniques will potentially change the way users rebuild technologies for the sustainable use of different biological processes for wastewater, air, and solid waste treatment. This special issue received 34 research/review articles over a period of 6 months, of which 21 high-quality papers (62%) were accepted for publication following a double blind peer-review process. These accepted papers focus on the various fundamental and applied engineering aspects of different techniques and processes that have potential practical implications in emerging fields of environmental biotechnology. This special issue highlights certain challenging issues pertaining to environmental monitoring and pollution abatement that can be categorized into five thematic research areas.