Plants in Anthropogenic Environments: Responses to Sound and Novel Environmental Cues

Plants face unique challenges and opportunities as human activities reshape natural landscapes and introduce novel environmental stimuli. This Research Topic explores how plants perceive and respond to environmental cues, such as acoustic signals, mechanical vibrations, and other stimuli arising from anthropogenic activities. We aim to understand how plants adapt their physiology, growth, and development in modified environments, including urban areas, agricultural landscapes, and ecosystems influenced by climate change. Special emphasis is given to the emerging field of plant bioacoustics, which examines how plants detect and respond to sound and vibration, alongside their responses to artificial lighting, urban pollutants, and altered microclimates. By integrating insights from diverse fields, this collection seeks to uncover the mechanisms behind plant resilience and explore their applications in sustainable ecosystems and crop management.

Plants are remarkably perceptive organisms, capable of detecting subtle changes in their environment. Anthropogenic landscapes, however, present new and often extreme stimuli—such as increased noise, vibrations from industrial and agricultural machinery, artificial lighting, and urban heat islands—that may impact plant physiology and development. Recent advances reveal that plants are not only affected by these factors but may actively adapt to them, with mechanisms such as mechanoperception and bioacoustics playing critical roles. Understanding how plants interact with and adapt to anthropogenic cues can reveal fundamental insights into plant biology while supporting efforts to improve agricultural resilience and ecosystem sustainability.

This Research Topic seeks to investigate how plants perceive, respond to, and adapt within anthropogenic environments. Key goals include:
• Elucidating the mechanisms of plant responses to sound, vibration, and other mechanical stimuli in natural and modified environments.
• Understanding how urbanization, pollution, and artificial lighting influence plant physiology and development.
• Exploring the adaptive strategies of plants in urban ecosystems and their role in mitigating environmental challenges such as pollution and climate change.
• Identifying practical applications of plant responses to anthropogenic stimuli, such as optimizing urban green spaces or developing noise-resilient crops.

By bridging fundamental plant physiology with applied research, this collection aims to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding how plants thrive in increasingly human-dominated ecosystems.

We welcome contributions addressing a broad range of themes, including but not limited to:
1. Plant responses to sound, vibration, and mechanical forces in anthropogenic and natural environments.
2. Impacts of urbanization, noise pollution, and artificial lighting on plant growth, metabolism, and reproduction.
3. The role of plant bioacoustics and mechanoperception in ecological and agricultural systems.
4. Adaptive strategies of plants in urban, industrial, and climate-altered ecosystems.
5. Innovations in methodology for studying plant responses to anthropogenic stimuli.

Manuscripts may include original research, reviews, perspectives, and methodological papers. This collection encourages interdisciplinary approaches, combining plant physiology, ecology, urban forest, and environmental sciences, to advance both theoretical knowledge and practical solutions for resilient plant systems in human-altered environments.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Plant-environment interactions, anthropogenic impact, bioacoustics, urban ecology, mechanoperception, plant resilience

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.