About Plant Soil and Environment

Plant, Soil and Environment

Plant, Soil and Environment (in its current official styling, Plant, Soil and Environment, abbreviated Plant Soil Environ.) is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed monthly journal of plant, soil and environmental science published in Prague by the Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and financed by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic. It has been published since 1955, until 2002 under the Czech title Rostlinná výroba, and it publishes in English experimental biology, agronomy, natural resources and the environment; plant development, growth and productivity; breeding and seed production; the growing of crops and their quality; soil care, conservation and productivity; and interactions between agriculture and the environment from the perspective of sustainable development. Its print ISSN is 1214-1178 and its online ISSN is 1805-9368. Readers should not confuse it with Plant and Soil, a separate Springer journal with a similar name: the two titles, publishers, ISSNs and editorial offices are different, and citations, submissions and metrics for one do not transfer to the other.

Overview: a long-running Central European journal with an international readership

Few agricultural journals in Central Europe can show a publication history as long as this one. The publisher states plainly that the journal has been published since 1955, and that until 2002 it appeared under the title Rostlinná výroba, a Czech name associated with plant production. The change to the English title Plant, Soil and Environment at the start of the present century was more than a cosmetic renaming. It signalled a widening of the frame: from crop production in a largely national conversation to the plant–soil–environment system in an international, English-language conversation, in which Czech field experiments sit alongside work from across Europe, Asia and beyond, and in which soil care and environmental interaction carry weight equal to yield itself. The continuity matters for authors and librarians alike. Searches for older work need to reckon with the earlier title, while the current title, ISSN pair and DOI suffix -PSE identify the modern journal unambiguously.

Today the journal is administered by an international editorial board, led, on the publisher's listing, by Editor-in-Chief prof. Ing. Václav Vaněk, CSc., with co-editors prof. Ing. Miroslav Juršík, prof. Ing. Daniela Pavlíková, CSc. and prof. Ing. Pavel Tlustoš, CSc., dr. h. c., and an executive editor, Mgr. Kateřina Součková. Editorial leadership should always be rechecked on the publisher's page before a submission or a formal citation of the board, because boards change, but the structure itself is informative: this is a society-academy journal run through the CAAS journals platform at agriculturejournals.cz, alongside sister CAAS titles in soil and water research, plant protection, agricultural engineering and veterinary medicine, rather than a standalone commercial title. That academy setting shapes its character. The journal is financed by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, published in the public interest as part of a national agricultural-science publishing programme, and offered open access so that practitioners, advisers and researchers outside subscription libraries can read it.

Its stated place in the literature can be summarised in one sentence: it publishes work that connects how plants grow, how soils behave, and how farming affects — and is affected by — the environment, with sustainable development as the explicit longer view. That positioning explains both its strengths and its boundaries. A rigorous pot experiment on nutrient bioavailability, a multi-year field trial on fertilisation, a study of soil organic matter under different tillage, and a paper on a stress treatment that changes crop physiology all belong here if the plant, soil or environmental link is real and evidenced. A purely molecular study with no plant, soil or agronomic bearing, a clinical paper, or a food-processing study that never returns to the crop or the soil would need a different home.

Scope in detail: what the journal covers

The publisher's aims and scope wording is compact, and it repays careful reading. It names, first, experimental biology, agronomy, natural resources and the environment as the broad territories. Inside those territories it specifies plant development, growth and productivity; breeding and seed production; growing of crops and their quality; soil care, conservation and productivity; and agriculture–environment interactions from the perspective of sustainable development. Articles are published in English, and the types published are original scientific papers, information, review studies and communications. Each element does practical work for an author deciding where to submit.

Plant development, growth and productivity covers the physiology and agronomy of how a crop becomes a crop: germination and establishment, phenology, photosynthesis and assimilate partitioning in field-relevant terms, responses to water deficit, heat, salinity and other stresses, growth regulators, and the yield and quality outcomes that follow. Breeding and seed production covers selection, variety evaluation and seed work where the evidence supports a plant or agronomic conclusion, rather than a purely genomic claim detached from performance. Growing of crops and their quality covers cultivation systems, rotations, intercropping, fertilisation strategies in their crop dimension, and the compositional and technological quality of the harvested product. Soil care, conservation and productivity is the second pillar: soil fertility and nutrient cycling, soil organic matter and carbon, soil structure and tillage, erosion and conservation practice, soil testing and its interpretation for fertiliser recommendation, remediation and the behaviour of contaminants in soil, and the soil biology that underpins fertility. The environment is the third pillar, not an afterthought: nutrient losses to water and air, greenhouse-gas-relevant soil processes, agrochemical fate, land-use change, and the sustainability assessment of production systems all fall inside the agriculture–environment interaction the scope describes.

Two published examples, both taken from the journal's own archive, show the range concretely. A 2009 paper in volume 55 compared three multi-nutrient soil tests — Mehlich 3, ammonium acetate and water extraction — against the bioavailability of potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, manganese and boron to barley in pot experiments across 36 soils, after gypsum treatment, asking which test a laboratory and an adviser can trust. A 2021 paper in volume 67 tested foliar paclobutrazol and putrescine at several doses on mung bean under water deficit and well-watered conditions, measuring proline, chlorophyll, membrane stability and seed yield, and deriving dose guidance from regression. One paper is soil chemistry in service of fertiliser advice; the other is crop physiology in service of drought management. They share the journal's signature: an experiment designed tightly enough that a reader can judge the numbers, and a conclusion that reaches a soil, a crop or a management decision.

History and identity: Rostlinná výroba to an English-language title

The journal's history, as the publisher presents it, begins in 1955 under Rostlinná výroba. For much of the twentieth century such a title served a Czechoslovak and then Czech research community publishing largely for domestic agriculture. The retitling by 2002, and the use of the present title from the 2003 volume sequence that most indexing records show for Plant, Soil and Environment, mark the internationalisation step: English as the language of publication, an international board, and a scope statement written for readers who may never have seen the Czech title. Authors citing pre-2003 work should give the title as it appeared on the paper they used; authors assessing the journal today should judge the current title, board and metrics, not the older national format.

Identity checks are unusually important here because of the near-namesake problem. Plant and Soil, published by Springer, is a well-known journal of plant–soil interaction with its own ISSNs, board and history, and its name differs from this journal's name by word order and one conjunction. Database searches, reference managers and even experienced researchers occasionally conflate the two. The reliable discriminators are the publisher — Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences for Plant, Soil and Environment — the ISSNs 1214-1178 and 1805-9368, the Prague editorial setting, the monthly CAAS platform, and the DOI form 10.17221/…-PSE visible on this journal's articles. If a record shows Springer as publisher, or a DOI beginning 10.1007 and the journal code for Plant and Soil, it is the other journal, however similar the topic may look.

A second identity point concerns the site record from which this profile was prepared. Journals World holds two records for this same journal: this post, titled Plant Soil and Environment without commas, and an earlier record titled Plant, Soil and Environment with the slug plant-soil-and-environment. Both records carry the same ISSN pair — 1214-1178 and 1805-9368 — and the earlier record was still in thin template form, at 244 words, when this profile was prepared. The pair is therefore reported in this batch as a confirmed thin duplicate: one journal, two records, neither previously at full depth. That note belongs in the profile itself because a reader who lands on either record should understand that they describe a single journal, and that the bibliographic facts — title with commas, CAAS as publisher, the ISSN pair — are the stable identifiers across both.

Metrics, indexing and how to read them

The publisher reports a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 1.8, placement in Q2 in Agronomy, and a five-year impact factor of 2.2, attributed to Web of Science. The earlier Journals World record for the journal also carried an h-index of 79. Those figures describe a solid, established mid-field journal: not a small national bulletin, and not one of the handful of very high-impact general titles that dominate agronomy headlines. For most authors the practical reading is straightforward. A paper here enters the indexed agronomy and soil-science conversation, is discoverable through the major citation databases that cover the journal, and will be read by the specialists who work on the same soil, crop or nutrient problem. Quartile and impact factor should still be verified in the current Journal Citation Reports or SCImago listing for the year that matters to an author's institution, because quartiles move with the category and the year, and a Q2 label from one year is not a promise for the next.

Metrics should not be asked to do more than they can. An impact factor is a journal-level average driven by a minority of highly cited papers; it does not certify the quality of any single article, and it does not predict whether a given paper will be cited. What the journal's longevity, academy publisher, international board and sustained indexing do certify is continuity: the archive from Rostlinná výroba through the modern English title remains one citable record, DOIs resolve, and the monthly rhythm has been maintained. For a researcher choosing between venues, that continuity, the fit of the scope, and the open-access readership are usually more decision-relevant than a decimal point of impact factor. For a librarian or evaluator, the ISSN pair and the CAAS platform are the anchors; for a reader, the test is simpler — whether the methods, soil and site descriptions, and statistics in a paper are reported fully enough to be reused.

Peer review, article types and editorial practice

The journal describes itself as peer-reviewed, and its published types are original scientific papers, information, review studies and communications. In practice that means the default expectation is a complete experimental or observational study reported as an original paper; a review study is expected to synthesise a field, not merely list it; and a communication is a shorter, focused contribution. The publisher's author materials set formal expectations for manuscripts, including citation style, and published articles show the house pattern clearly: authors with affiliations, a structured presentation of aim, methods, results and discussion, keywords, references cited in the journal's style, a received and published history on the article page, and a DOI of the form 10.17221/…-PSE. Proofs are sent to the corresponding author, and the publisher's instructions in its author PDF ask for proof corrections to be returned within 48 hours — a small detail that tells authors to plan for a prompt proof stage and to keep the corresponding author's contact current.

Because this profile is based on the publisher's public pages, any point the publisher does not state publicly — a guaranteed review timeline, an acceptance rate, or a fixed number of reviewers for every paper — is treated here as not publicly disclosed, and authors should not rely on third-party sites that invent such numbers. What can be said from the record is that the journal has sustained monthly publication with a full international authorship, which is itself evidence of an operating editorial pipeline: submissions are screened, sent for specialist assessment in agronomy, soil science and related fields, revised, and produced to a consistent format. Authors help that pipeline most by submitting a manuscript that already looks like the journal: English of publishable quality, a clear statement of the plant, soil or environmental question, site and soil characterisation sufficient for another researcher to place the experiment, replication and statistics described rather than asserted, and conclusions that stay inside the data.

Open access, licensing and costs

Plant, Soil and Environment is an open-access journal: readers do not need a subscription to read its articles on the CAAS platform. The publisher has announced a licence change that authors should note carefully. All articles submitted to CAAS journals from 2026 will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, CC BY 4.0, which allows broad reuse, distribution and adaptation with appropriate credit to the original authors. Articles submitted by 2025 are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, CC BY-NC 4.0. The licence printed on the article itself is the governing statement for that article, so anyone reusing a figure or a dataset should read the licence on the paper in hand rather than assuming the newest terms apply retrospectively.

On charges, the responsible statement is the cautious one: this profile does not assert a specific article processing charge figure, because a current fee amount could not be verified from the publisher pages consulted for this profile, and fee schedules change. Authors for whom a charge, or the absence of one, is decisive should confirm the current position directly with the editorial office at the CAAS journals platform before submitting, and should keep that confirmation with their submission records. The financing note — that the journal is financed by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic — is relevant context, since ministry-financed academy journals in this programme have historically been reader-free; it is not, by itself, a fee promise for a future year, and it is not presented as one here.

How to submit, and how to write for this journal

Submission is through the Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences journals platform, where Plant, Soil and Environment sits among the CAAS titles. Before submitting, an author should do four things. First, confirm scope fit honestly, using the test in this profile: name the plant, soil or environmental question in one sentence, and check it against the publisher's scope items. Second, prepare the manuscript to the journal's author instructions, including its reference style; the journal's own examples show references formatted with full journal titles in citations of its articles, DOIs where they exist, and book and proceedings references given in the detailed form the instructions prescribe. Third, make the methods reproducible: soil classification and properties, site coordinates or at least region and soil type, experimental design, treatments, replication, analytical methods and statistical models belong in the paper, not in a reply to a reviewer. Fourth, write the English carefully or have it edited before submission; the journal publishes in English only, and language that obscures a method or a result slows review and weakens an otherwise sound study.

Common reasons a sound study still struggles at a journal like this are predictable, and avoidable. A single-season, single-site result presented as a general recommendation invites a request for restraint or more data; the better paper states its inference space plainly. A fertilisation paper that reports yield without soil-test values, nutrient balances or any environmental reading wastes the journal's distinctive plant–soil–environment frame. A physiology paper that never connects a laboratory response to a crop, a soil or a field condition will be asked why it belongs here rather than in a plant-physiology title. Conversely, papers that use this journal well tend to share a habit: they keep the three elements of the title in view. Even a study centred on one element — a soil test, a cultivar, a stress treatment — explains what its result means for the other two, and for the sustainable management the scope names as its perspective.

Who should publish here, and who should look elsewhere

This journal is a strong fit for agronomists, soil scientists, crop physiologists, plant breeders working with performance evidence, agro-environmental researchers and interdisciplinary teams whose work links production with soil health or environmental outcomes, especially — though by no means only — in temperate and Central European conditions, and for authors who value an established, indexed, open-access academy journal with a monthly schedule and a readership of specialists and advisers. It is also a sensible venue for long-term field experiments, soil-survey and soil-testing studies, and regionally grounded work of international methodological interest, categories that very general journals sometimes undervalue and that this journal's history shows it understands.

It is a weaker fit for work whose centre of gravity lies elsewhere: pure molecular biology without a plant-performance or soil link, animal science, food technology that leaves the crop behind, clinical or biomedical research, and economics or policy analysis with no biophysical evidence. Authors in those areas will serve their papers better in a title whose scope names their field. It is also the wrong venue for a manuscript whose authors need the Springer journal Plant and Soil specifically — for a funder, institution or collaboration reason — because, as this profile has stressed, the two journals are distinct, and publication in one is not publication in the other.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Plant, Soil and Environment? Print ISSN 1214-1178 and online ISSN 1805-9368. Both appear on the publisher's journal page, and the same pair appears on both Journals World records for the journal.

Who publishes the journal, and where? The Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in Prague, Czech Republic. The journal is financed by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, per the publisher.

Since when has it been published, and under what earlier title? Since 1955, and until 2002 under the title Rostlinná výroba, per the publisher. The current English title covers the modern sequence from 2003 in most listings.

How often does it appear, and in what language? Monthly, twelve issues a year, with articles published in English.

What is its impact factor? The publisher reports a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 1.8, Q2 in Agronomy, with a five-year impact factor of 2.2. Verify the figure for the current year in Journal Citation Reports before relying on it for an institutional requirement.

Is it open access? Yes. Articles are free to read on the CAAS platform. Articles submitted from 2026 are under CC BY 4.0; articles submitted by 2025 are under CC BY-NC 4.0. Read the licence on the individual article for reuse.

Is Plant, Soil and Environment the same as Plant and Soil? No. Plant and Soil is a separate Springer journal. Check the publisher, the ISSNs and the DOI prefix: 10.17221/…-PSE identifies this journal.

What does it publish? Original scientific papers, information, review studies and communications in experimental biology, agronomy, natural resources and the environment, covering plant growth and productivity, breeding and seed production, crop growing and quality, soil care, conservation and productivity, and agriculture–environment interactions for sustainable development.

Does it charge authors? A current charge figure could not be verified from the publisher pages consulted for this profile. Confirm the current position with the editorial office before submitting if cost is decisive for you.

Verification notes

This profile is based on the publisher's own journal page and licence notice on the Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences journals platform, on articles published in the journal itself, and on the Journals World records for the journal, all consulted for Batch 512. Facts the publisher does not state publicly — including a guaranteed review speed and an acceptance rate — are described as not publicly disclosed rather than estimated. Editorial board membership, metrics and licence terms can change; the publisher's page is the place to recheck them at the moment of submission.