The issue of scales and nonlinear physical, chemical and biological processes is of fundamental importance in HYDROLOGY and SOIL SCIENCE. The questions of how such processes are organized in space and time across a range of scales, how different processes interact at different scales, and how observations at one scale are related to those at another have profound implications for our understanding of both systems and the interactions between them. For example, soil dynamics reveals high complexity at different scales, as a result of numerous interactions between the mineral material, biological processes (micro-organisms, plants, animals), climate (water, air, temperature), and its position in the landscape.

This session will include contributions related to all aspects of scaling, nonlinearity, and complexity on the earth surface, and in the soil. The session will especially focus on studies using an integrated, cross-disciplinary approach, based on statistical scaling analysis, physical-biogeochemical models, or on other methods and techniques of complex systems science, such as statistical learning, data mining, time series analysis, network analysis, cellular automata, fractal/multifractals, wavelets, genetic algorithms and graph theory. Research work on processes occurring at the laboratory, hillslope, local, regional, continental, or global scales are all appropriate.

Selected presentations of this session at EGU-2008 and EGU-2009 can be found at:
Geoderma. Volume 160, Issue 1, pp. 1-130 (30 November 2010)
http://www.biogeosciences.net/special_issue70.html

Selected presentations of this session at EGU-2010 are being submitted to Soil Science Journal.

Funding provided by EGU YSTA support, by CEIGRAM (Research Centre for the Management of Agricultural and Environmental Risks) and by Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) through project no. AGL2010-21501/AGR is greatly appreciated.