Soil models require a large variety of information from different sources. The existence and availability of these data is often unknown for model developers and users, making the compilation of the required data sets for modeling a tedious task. Soil modeling is currently being conducted in a large number of different disciplines, and measurement results and models are scattered. Model developers and experimentalists generating valuable data typically belong to unrelated teams and therefore, experimental data often cannot be directly used in modeling, and vice versa. The recently established International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC) aims to address these issues by bringing together modelers and experimentalist. This session is a first step in this direction and we seek presentations that show opportunities of resolving the current data-model conundrum in soil, and more generally, environmental modeling. Presentations will be welcomed that address approaches to creating protocols for summarizing model’s data requirements, and model parameter estimation from more readily available data. We expect to hear on availability of data and models to address uncertainty in characterization of soil and terrestrial processes, data/observation requirements change with spatial and temporal scale/resolution of processes/models, and need and feasibility for standardization and harmonization of data required for soil modeling. We welcome modelling studies that use multi-scale data sets to validate upscaling approaches using inverse modelling, data assimilation and other techniques. Demonstrations of the value of patterns in observed data to support model validation will be of interest.

https://soil-modeling.org/governance