Orals

The soil environment hosts a vast array of interfaces, ranging from those between microbes and aggregates, bulk soils and roots, to the interactions of soils with the bedrock and atmosphere. A range of physical, biological and chemical processes occur at these interfaces across different spatial and temporal scales, sustaining a wealth of ecosystem functions and services.

Soil systems are therefore dynamic environments. The behaviour and response of these complex systems to short-term perturbation and long-term environmental change pose fascinating challenges for soil scientists. Many of the major drivers of environmental change are anthropic in origin, including accelerated climatic change and shifts in land use and management. To ensure soils continue to provide valuable functions and services it is vitally important that we study the wide variety of soil interfaces and understand how the processes occurring across them may respond to current and potential future environmental change scenarios.

In this session we hope to bring together researchers at all career stages from different sub-disciplines of soil science to discuss these interactions and how these are affected by broader changes within the environment. Soil systems encompass an exceptional array of biogeochemical components; as such we welcome studies from a wide range of researchers using empirical or modelling-based approaches. We especially encourage contributions which present research encompassing different components of the soil system and the interactions between soil processes and the wider environment.