Recently, scientists and politicians have become aware that soils are not an unlimited resource and provide many ecosystem services. Consequently, the soil science community needs to deliver high-resolution soil products and information on soil security, at regional to global extents. Research efforts have been focusing on improving digital soil mapping methods but also understanding the functioning of soils in relation to the Earth Spheres.
In this session we will address the current state of the art in large-extent spatial and spatiotemporal soil modelling, addressing problems such as data availability, scale-dependent soil-landscape processes and the development of different soil inference systems. There is particular interest in geostatistical methods for large datasets, modelling accuracy and temporal modelling approaches. Another topic of interest involves the incorporation of data from various dates (e.g. old legacy data or time-series from remote sensing data) to produce an estimate of a soil property at a given unique date. Besides these technical topics, research addressing soil security at regional to global scales is a key interest.
We aim to bring together scientists working on research related to using the full range of spatial and temporal modelling techniques available for soil science, applied to large-scale studies. Within the Soil System Sciences programme group, we will communicate recent advances in this field and we aim to identify the challenges and opportunities lying ahead of us for delivering high-resolution soil information.