Journal of Sensors
Volume 2016 (2016), Article ID 4108790, 1 page
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/4108790

Editorial

Sensors for Environmental Monitoring

Liling Fu,¹ Panagiotis Dallas,² Virender K. Sharma,³ and Kewei Zhang⁴

¹Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
²Department of Materials, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PH, UK
³Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
⁴School of Materials Science and Engineering, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi 030024, China

Received 19 June 2016; Accepted 19 June 2016

Copyright © 2016 Liling Fu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Many potentially harmful chemicals, released by industries and human activities, can contaminate water, soil, or air and further impact the environment and public health. Real-time and in situ monitoring of various contaminants such as pathogens, metals, radioisotopes, volatile organic compounds, crude oil, and agricultural chemicals at low levels is mandatory in the fields of industrial plants, automotive technologies, health and medicine, air and water quality control, natural soil/land/sea, and so forth. Reliable sensing technologies with high performance are highly desirable to address these issues. Sensitivity, selectivity, and limit of detection are several key parameters to evaluate the performance of sensors. The aim of this special issue is to present original research articles on all kinds of sensors for monitoring environment. The topics cover various aspects including design and fabrication of sensor platforms for environmental monitoring, theoretical studies in sensing mechanisms and principles for environmental monitoring, sensors for real-time and in situ monitoring environments, detection of pathogen in water, monitoring pollutant gases, inspection and monitoring of contaminated soil/land/sea, development of portable sensors for environmental monitoring, and multitarget detection in environmental monitoring. The papers in this special issue provide significant scientific contribution to the development and applications of sensing technologies in environmental monitoring. With respect to the above, this collection of articles is expected to be of interest for environmental engineering practitioners and researchers.

Acknowledgments

The guest editors of this special issue are most grateful to all the authors and reviewers who have generously contributed to this special issue.

Liling Fu
Panagiotis Dallas
Virender K. Sharma
Kewei Zhang