Urban soils and Technosols provide ecosystem services like filtration, storage and food production but also industrial production, waste treatment, cultural life and recreation.

These soils differ from natural soils in the dynamics of pedogenetic processes which are dominated by anthropogenic disturbances. They also differ in the origin and properties of parent materials which are mostly of technogenic origin.
Technogenic materials have specific physical and biogeochemical properties. A systematic knowledge on these properties is still lacking, may be because the applicability of established standard methods is questionable. Therefore, investigations of technogenic materials often lead to new methodologic developments, of which presentations are welcome in this session.

Because of their anthropogenic character and the similarities to the above mentioned soils, soils of industrialized, traffic infrastructure, mining and military areas are also addressed in this session.

A challenge within different disciplines, such as agriculture and forestry, geomorphology, ecology, etc., is the characterization of physical soil properties and functions. These properties influence amongst others the ecological functioning (e.g. water retention, buffer- and filter properties of soils), economical productivity (e.g. quality and quantity of agricultural and forestry products) and the development of geomorphological features with time. The quantitative description of soil physical properties and functions therefore is essential and within the different disciplines varying approaches and ‘standard methods’ are applied. It can be differentiated between invasive methods, e.g. the collection of undisturbed samples and their analysis under laboratory conditions or with CT technology and non-invasive methods, e.g., geophysical approaches such as georadar and ERT, or optical remote sensing approaches . The different methods are usually applied for soil physical characterization at different spatial scales: invasive methods mostly stay at the profile or plot scale, geophysical methods are employed to describe properties at field scale, while remote sensing approaches are mainly applied for prospection on the regional scale.
This session focuses on a comparison of the different invasive and non-invasive methods and aims at establishing connections between the different scales of application. We especially invite contributions on combined applications of invasive and non-invasive methods and on the testing of methods beyond the common scales of application. Authors are also invited to present results gained with specific methodological approaches and discuss the adequacy of their methods for the different scales and objectives.