Abstract
Two years of COVID-19 pandemic have unquestionably highlighted several aspects of vulnerability of the major economic sectors - including food production - as we designed them before the occurrence of such a challenging sanitary emergency. Among these, horticulture has gone through an unprecedented crisis at a global scale stressing the need for the definition of new models of holistic, sustainable, and resilient cropping systems (i.e., Horticulture 2.0). In this direction goes the increased interest for short-chain food production systems (urban and indoor farming, vertical farming, etc.), multipurpose (recreational farming) and multifunctional agricultural systems (exploitation of biowaste, polyculture, agroforestry, etc.), and sustainable crop management (biostimulants, smart use of resources, etc.). In 2021, Italus Hortus went through its second year of active editorial activity since it became an international journal in horticultural science. In this year, the journal received a total of 43 submissions and, in the same year, the Board of Editors reached a decision on 32 manuscripts (2 of these were submitted in 2020). This editorial activity allowed the publication of the three issues of volume 28, that included a total of 18 papers (4 Reviews, 10 Original Research Papers, and 4 Brief Research Reports) and 1 Editorial (Figure 1A). Sixty-one percent of the published papers had corresponding authors based in Italy, whereas the remaining contributions were provided by 7 other countries (Figure 1B).