It has frequently been reported that soils and soil properties are changing in time. Quantitative understanding of dynamic effects on the description and prediction of flow and transport phenomena or water and element budgets of soil ecosystems is, however, relatively limited. Temporal changes of soil properties occurring at a wide range of time scales (i.e., minutes, days, years, decades) are intrinsically tied to land use and particular soil spatial (pore, pedon, slope, field, landscape) distribution patterns in the landscape (c.f., soil landscape and hydropedology concepts).
The dynamics of soil properties can be:
a) “Rapid”, due to soil cultivation or individual erosion/accumulation events, fire and other catastrophic events and cyclic, due to wetting and drying, freezing and thawing, vegetation development, crop rotations, as well as biologically mediated due to bioactivity (burrowing, plant root growth, microbial and fungi), structure formation, aggregation, and swelling and shrinking can create or destroy pathways for preferential flow and transport.
b) “Intermediate”, due to gradual changes in content of fine particles by wind and water erosion or changes in soil carbon contents and changes in the organic matter composition leading to structural changes and development of water repellency, among other processes;
c) “Slow”, due to pedogenetic developments leading to changes in soil horizons at a longer scale and geomorphological changes or changes in the water regimes (flooding and drainage), salt leaching, accumulation, acidification, surface crust development, hydraulic properties modifications induced by irrigation with saline water or wastewater;
In the spatially structured landscape, a variety of the above mentioned changes can occur at different positions in the landscape at the same time such as changes in soil properties in one region affect soil properties in the other region (e.g., erosion/accumulation).
This session focuses on the dynamic of soil properties as an interpretative key for better understanding flow and transport in soil landscapes and feedbacks between soil changes and fluxes. The challenge is how we can account for changing hydraulic behavior when attempting to quantify fluxes such as, for instance, infiltration, storage, run-off, groundwater recharge, salt and particle movement or transport of contaminants.
All contributions are welcome on individual and on interconnected soil dynamics, observations, conceptual modeling, experimental and field studies including also regional observations of specific cases of dynamic soil properties not only across Europe.