The issue of scales and nonlinear physical, chemical and biological processes is of fundamental importance in 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.

We present several Keynote speakers:
Jennifer Pett-Ridge "Combination of NanoSIMS and SEM considering spatial scales"
R. E. Falconer "A pore scale model of Soil Organic Matter (SOM) dynamics and microbial colonisation"
Daniel Gimenez "Using Entropy to Quantify Soil Structure from Water Retention and Texture Data"
Murray Lark "Quality measures for geostatistical prediction of log-normal soil properties"

Selected presentations of this session at EGU-2008, EGU-2009 and EGU-2010 can be found at:
Geoderma. Volume 160, Issue 1, pp. 1-130 (30 November 2010)
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/geoderma/special-issues/

http://www.biogeosciences.net/special_issue70.html

Soil Science, 177(2), pp 79-152 (February 2012)
http://journals.lww.com/soilsci/pages/currenttoc.aspx

Selected presentations of this session at EGU-2011 are being submitted to Journal of Environmental Quality.

Funding provided 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.