Editorial: Trends and Challenges in Plant Biomonitoring, Bioremediation and Biomining

The pollution of the environment is a pressing global challenge. Biomonitoring of soil, water, and air pollution using plants is cost-effective, sustainable, and easy to use. Hyperaccumulator plants can be used in eco-friendly bioremediation technologies to recover functional environmental elements. Despite the many studies on metal uptake by plants and the effects of pollutants on plants, the number of ready-to-use technologies for bioremediation and biomining is limited. The mechanisms involved in the pollutant's uptake and translocation and their enhancement by different methods are poorly understood; therefore, further investigations are necessary for efficient pollution monitoring, and eco-friendly, low-cost, sustainable, and highly accurate methods are needed. A possible approach that could fulfill all these criteria is using plants for pollution biomonitoring, as they act as pollution integrators over long periods. Polluted sites must be cleaned and restored; if possible, the valuable elements should be recovered. Different plant species were found to be suitable for all these processes, yet no ready-to-use methods or standardized approaches are available. This Research Topic intends to gather different research that could shed light on the recent developments in biomonitoring, bioremediation, and biomining to overcome the knowledge gap necessary to upscale the results of promising lab scale or field studies, as well as to highlight the associated challenges and opportunities. This Research Topic aims to explore the use of different plant species to biomonitoring environmental pollution, recover valuable elements from the environment, and bioremediate the environment.