Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation II

The use of sustainable soil conservation practices has become more and more widespread in recent decades due to the growing awareness that soil, a non-renewable resource delivering multiple ecosystem services, is increasingly being menaced by various processes, such as erosion, pollution, loss of organic matter, desertification, salinization, loss of biodiversity, and many others. The development of innovative and sustainable soil management practices, capable of improving soil quality and ensuring high crop yields at the same time, requires every effort by the scientific community to acquire new knowledge about the complex functioning of agroecosystems, and to transfer the acquired knowledge to technicians and farmers so that it can be applied in real field conditions. A decisive role is also played by governments, whose support is necessary to reach the objectives fixed by the European Green Deal and by the ambitious European mission “Caring for soil is caring for life” [1]. This Special Issue (SI), in continuity with the previous version [2], aims to collect innovative research in the field of sustainable agriculture and soil conservation, in order to implement the divulgation of basic knowledge in this study area and favor its application on a real scale. A summary of the articles published has been reported in the following section. This SI collects seven original articles which focus on a number of key issues of sustainable and conservative agriculture, namely soil quality assessment, prevention of soil erosion, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, sustainability assessment, monitoring of soil organic and inorganic pollution, waste recover, and ecological engineering. Three papers are methodological works [3–5], while the remaining are case studies.