The biophysical interactions between plants and their environment have attained substantial interest from plant physiologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, ecologists and climatologists in recent years. This interest stems from the need to improve how plants respond to environmental and agricultural issues, such as degraded soil quality, water-limited conditions, contaminant transport, and the impact of global change on plant mediated water fluxes in terrestrial systems. Emerging imaging, experimental and modelling tools, combined with new understanding of how biological and soil physical processes interact, from the soil to the leaf surface, has provided rapid advances in understanding. However, quantitative approaches to understand fundamental biophysical processes at the root-soil interface and the plant level to predict root water and nutrient uptake are still lacking.

This session aims to attract researchers who investigate plant related processes from rhizosphere to the field scale, and bring together scientists from multiple disciplines to discuss and better understand water and nutrient transfer across the soil, the soil-root interface, the plant tissues and the atmosphere. This includes:
• Advances in the understanding of plant uptake processes from the cell to the plant levels and their impact on modeling concepts
• Novel experimental techniques for assessing soil-root interactions
• Observations and modelling of water and nutrient fluxes through soil and plants
• Root and rhizosphere traits for optimal water uptake and drought tolerance
• Integrating soil physics and plant physiology through experiments and/or numerical modeling
• Plant adaptive behavior impacting root-soil interactions and water use efficiency
• Novel approaches/concepts for modelling soil-plant interactions
• Improvement of crop models based on a better representation of plant soil interactions
• Root traits that improve resource capture and their impact on specific soil properties such as pore structure and transport properties.