Consideration of soil functioning at regional, national and global scales is important and necessary in addressing issues surrounding provisioning of soil derived ecosystem services, and in determining soil's role in climate change. However, understanding soil’s role in the larger earth system is difficult due to the complexity and non-stationary of landscape connectivity that controls sediment movement and fate, the heterogeneous nature of soil, the difficulties in making observations at large scales and the fact that soil is an interface for biological, chemical, and physical processes that span orders of magnitude in space and time, and cross disciplinary boundaries – from geomorphology and hydrology, to ecology and biogeochemistry.
This session aims to bring together those engaged in modelling soil related processes at large scales, including: physical erosion or pedogenic processes; biological or chemical soil-mediated processes such as nutrient cycling and soil respiration; or those coming from ecosystem services or earth system perspectives; with those making advances in understanding connectivity as a driver of soil transfer and fate. The aim of the session is to provide a forum for discussing the barriers, progress and prospects of large-scale soil process representation and to discuss how we can develop knowledge on connectivity into a piece of useable science. This session is connected to a COST Action entitled ‘Connecting European connectivity research’.