Plant traits extend the range of earth observations to the level of individual organisms, providing a link to ecosystem function and modelling in the context of rapid global changes. However, overcoming the differences in temporal and spatial scales between plant trait data and biogeochemical cycles remains challenging.

This session will address the role of plant traits, biodiversity, acclimation, and adaptation in the biogeochemical cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. We welcome conceptual, observational, experimental and modelling approaches and studies from the local to the global scale, including in-situ or remote sensing observations.

Carbon allocation is a key process in ecosystems: it is coupled with plant growth, fuels metabolism and plays a crucial role for carbon sequestration in standing biomass and soil organic matter. While the importance of carbon allocation for plant and ecosystem functioning and the carbon balance is widely recognized, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms, responses to global changes and wider biogeochemical implications. Open questions include: 1) what drives carbon allocation in plants and ecosystems?; 2) what is the fate of newly assimilated carbon?; 3) what determines the allocation of nonstructural carbon to growth, metabolism and storage?, 4) how does carbon allocation affect nutrient and water relations in plants and ecosystems?; and 5) how do allocation patterns change under changing environmental conditions and what are the consequences for biogeochemical cycles? This session invites contributions from observational, experimental and modelling studies.

The health and productivity of crops, forests and natural plant communities are constrained by the increasing occurrence of climate extremes such as droughts, heat waves and frost events. Such climate extremes can trigger or amplify disturbances including insect outbreaks, wildfires and dieback-mortality episodes altering the structure, composition, and functioning of crops, forests and vegetation worldwide.
The mechanisms of plant dieback, often related to hydraulic failure and carbon starvation, have not been fully unravelled and linked to specific functional traits, leading to a need for multi-proxy approaches.
Understanding the plasticity of plant traits and mechanisms for acclimation is a key requisite for:
i) forecasting plant population dynamics and climate change-driven changes in community composition in natural plant ecosystems, and
ii) managing cultivation factors in crop systems (also in controlled environment agriculture – CEA - and in Bioregenerative Life Support Systems in extreme environments as Space) for resource use optimization to achieve sustainability goals, particularly under unfavorable climate conditions.
This session provides a forum on the role of functional traits (e.g., plant size, specific leaf area, leaf anatomy, leaf life span, leaf nitrogen content, seed mass, plant/root architecture, phenology, quantitative wood anatomy, wood density, hydraulic traits, etc.) as indicators and proxies of plant status and post-disturbance resilience.
We encourage contributions to the session that: (i) provide quantitative knowledge regarding the intra- and inter-specific diversity in functional traits for predicting plant vulnerability to environmental stressors; (ii) assess the potential of traits to acclimate under changing environmental conditions; (iii) show the ability of traits to serve as indicators of plant performance, survival and resilience; (iv) detect possible trade-offs among traits (e.g., coordination between hydraulic and photosynthetic processes) related to resource acquisition and allocation.
A multidisciplinary effort is needed to unravel plant acclimation and adaptation strategies and upscale gained information to evaluate implications for productivity of croplands, forests and natural terrestrial ecosystems as well as in CEA. Such information will be useful as input for dynamic global vegetation and crop models supporting international policy for sustainability.

The majority of world forest ecosystems are subject to a number of natural disturbances (e.g. wildfires, pests, diseases, adverse weather events). These can severely affect their health and vitality by causing tree mortality or by reducing their ability to provide the full range of goods and services. Understanding and quantifying forest vulnerability to such disturbances and the underlying driving mechanisms is crucial to assess climate impacts and develop effective adaptation strategies.
This session will cover aspects ranging from observed and projected climate change to consequences for forest ecosystems and forest assessment, spanning a range of scales and conditions. In particular, we welcome submissions on the following subjects:

• Forest mortality and die-back phenomena under global warming.
• Evaluation of the effects of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on forest health and growth.
• Vulnerability of old-growth forests and mountainous forest ecosystems to climate change.
• Multidisciplinary approaches towards monitoring and modelling tree vulnerability at the local, regional and global scale.
• Estimation of resistance, resilience and recovery of forests in drought-prone areas.
• Interdisciplinary forestry research covering not only ecological but also economic and social aspects.
• Effects of forest adaptive management on forest health and vulnerability.
• Methods and tools for decision support and adaptation support in the forestry sector.
• Modelling growth at different scales: wood, tree, forest.

Forest ecosystems play a crucial role in the global carbon budget, with mature forests being the most important land carbon sink. . However, the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to continue sequestering carbon under climate change remains unclear. In order to accurately predict their resilience to future warming, increasing CO2 concentrations, and subsequent feedback to the climate system, there is a need for improved understanding of forest responses at all scales, from physiology to the ecosystem level responses. We aim to gather new knowledge/data sets from global change experiments, remote sensing and modelling studies from forests across the world, including recent field warming and elevated CO2 experiments. We welcome work on organ- to ecosystem-level responses to warming and CO2 as well as work that helps to elucidate how such processes could be represented within vegetation modelling frameworks. With this session, we aim to broaden the mechanistic understanding of forest ecosystems and what their response to the imminent increases in atmospheric CO2 and temperature will mean for their capacity to sequester carbon.

Although climate change is a natural process, it is significantly stimulated by anthropogenic activities. The acceleration of climate change is directly connected with ecological stability, soil degradation, and hydrological extremes, which are considered as the main consequences of climate change. As climate change intensifies, extreme and unexpected weather events are becoming more frequent.
The aim of this session is to highlight a broad range of research methods and results related to climate change. This interdisciplinary session should reflect, discuss, and share scientific knowledge on a local and regional scale with the aim to increase innovative knowledge on climate change and its impacts, ecosystem response and new techniques to prevent and reduce the negative consequences.

This session awaits a variety of studies related to:
- climate change impacts (biodiversity loss, rising temperatures, hydrological change and extremes, soil degradation, ecosystem response to climate change);
- drought, precipitation deficiency or extreme precipitation with solutions aimed at reducing the negative impacts of droughts;
- ecological stability and climate change - how climate change affects ecological stability (reducing the degree of ecological stability, deforestation, human interactions with the environment) and evaluation of restoration success;
- construction of green buildings to support and increase the stability of the landscape;
- techniques and methods to prevent and reduce the negative impacts of climate change (such as soil degradation, carbon sequestration, changes in natural, agricultural, and forest ecosystems, reduction of overall ecological stability and character of the landscape);
- in addition, attention will be given to the sustainability of management practices, the importance of appropriate land use management as the main tool for preventing the degradation processes, the distribution and vitality of ecosystems, and improving the condition of forest ecosystems in order to increase the overall character of the landscape.

Natural disturbances are a primary driver of forest dynamics, thus shaping their composition and structure, and determining succession trajectories. Humans have always interacted with natural disturbances, and are in turn affected by the hazards posed by these events.
With the multitude of functions and services simultaneously and increasingly required from forest ecosystems, it is crucial to improve our understanding of the impact of natural disturbances on forests, also in light of the potential alterations introduced by different global change drivers, mostly due to anthropogenic activities.
Further attention is required to the many ways in which multiple disturbances (of biotic, abiotic and anthropogenic origin) interact with each other, thereby modifying the likelihood of occurrence and the effects of one another.
Despite an increasing awareness of the fundamental ecological role of natural disturbances, forest management still requires solid scientific input on how to increase the resistance and resilience of forests, and manage naturally disturbed landscapes to promote forest regeneration.
This complex situation calls for multi-scale, multi temporal, and multidisciplinary studies, taking advantage of field (in-situ) and remote sensing approaches, in order to capture the large heterogeneity and variability of the patterns and processes involved.
In the framework of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, preventing, halting and reversing forest ecosystems degradation due to lack of disturbances or altered disturbance regimes should become a focus of sustainable forest management.
In this session, we invite contributions from all fields in order to promote knowledge on disturbance ecology and management, aiming at developing methodologies and strategies to mitigate the impact of global change and its consequences on natural disturbances affecting forest ecosystems worldwide.

Climate change is happening faster at high latitudes than anywhere else on the Globe. Cryosphere biomes and high latitude ecosystems are vulnerable to a warmer climate, significantly changing their functioning with important feedbacks to global element cycling and climate.
Given the strong urgency of tackling the climate challenge and the particularly important role of high latitude ecosystems, this session is dedicated to integrating our understanding of global change effects in high latitude ecosystems based on experimental, observational and modelling approaches. We encourage presentations focusing on the impact of disappearing permafrost soil, acceleration of ‘Arctic greening’ and glacier retreat, short- and long-term effects of warming, elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, changes in precipitation, nutrient input, and combinations of multiple global change drivers. Meta-analyses and integrated studies combining observational, experimental and/or modelling approaches are also welcomed.

A fundamental understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions is an invaluable asset for accurately representing the terrestrial carbon, water, and energy cycles. Multiple processes determine how the exchange of mass, energy, and momentum scale from leaf to plant, to ecosystem, and eventually to the entire globe. Challenges remain in robustly formulating the mechanistic underpinnings of these biogeochemical processes across all these scales and improving process-based modelling efforts without falling into a complexity trap. At the same time, we are facing increasing availability of data at multiple scales, ranging from leaf-level measurements (e.g., gas exchange), tree-level measurements (e.g., sap flow and tree growth, dendroecology), ecosystem-level measurements (eddy covariance towers, UAVs, aircrafts) to synoptic Earth observations from space. These are opening to utilize machine learning algorithms and data-driven modelling as an alternative to process-based approaches. Though sometimes very successful in fitting observations, they are often plagued by lack of interpretability and physical consistency. However, recent developments like interpretable machine learning, physics-aware regression or causal inference models are attempts to mitigate these issues.
This session invites studies that improve our overall understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions by combining observations at different temporal and spatial scales as well as their seamless integration into modelling strategies. In addition to empirical multi-scale observations of carbon, energy and water fluxes, we invite research that explores data-driven diagnostics and constraints for model evaluation (e.g., Emergent Constraints), data-driven parameterizations in mechanistic models (e.g., Earth system models) and other developments of machine-learning / hybrid modelling strategies (e.g., fusion of data-driven approaches and mechanistic models, interpretable machine learning, causal inference) for an integrated understanding of carbon, energy and water fluxes across scales.

A wide range of processes influence the response of the vegetation, soils, and terrestrial carbon fluxes to changes in land and atmospheric moisture availability. Such responses also occur over a wide range of time scales, ranging from extreme events like floods, droughts or heatwaves, to long-term shifts in background climate. In addition, the vegetation and soils regulate land-atmosphere moisture and energy fluxes, which in turn feed back to the broader climate system.

Advances in remote sensing, experimental studies, and the growing number of in situ measurements and ecosystem trait databases can now be combined with machine learning, statistical approaches and/or mechanistic models, to understand how plants, soils, and ecosystems respond to climate variability. Combining these data in innovative ways will help to evaluate and improve models of plant-stress and carbon exchange, and in-turn climate projections.

Contributions might include, for example, regional to global evaluations of the vegetation and ecosystem response to various environmental stressors (e.g. soil moisture, temperature, etc.) and climatic variability, using in-situ and/or satellite observations to evaluate or improve the representation of water-carbon interactions and biological processes in models, new representations of plant and ecosystem response to land and atmospheric moisture stress (e.g. through plant hydraulics, optimality approaches, etc.), and improvements in our understanding of how soils and plant-stress regulate surface fluxes and boundary layer processes.

Solicited authors:
Charlotte Grossiord, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
René Orth, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

Human activities are altering a range of environmental conditions, including atmospheric CO2 concentration, climate, and nutrient inputs. However, understanding and predicting their combined impacts on ecosystem structure and functioning and biogeochemical cycles is challenging. Divergent future projections of terrestrial ecosystem models reveal uncertainties about fundamental processes and missing observational constraints. Models are routinely tested and calibrated against data from ecosystem flux measurements, remote sensing, atmospheric inversions and ecosystem inventories. However, it remains challenging to use available observations to constrain process representations and parameterizations in models simulating the response of ecophysiological, biogeochemical, and hydrological processes to environmental changes.

This session focuses on the influence of CO2, temperature, water stress, and nutrients on ecosystem functioning and structure. A focus is set on learning from experiments and novel uses of continuous ecosystem monitoring and Earth observation data for informing theory and ecosystem models. Contributions may cover a range of scales and scopes, including plant ecophysiology, soil organic matter dynamics, soil microbial activity, nutrient cycling, plant-soil interactions, or ecosystem dynamics.

The need to predict ecosystem responses to anthropogenic change, including but not limited to changes in climate and increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is more pressing than ever. Global change is inherently multi-factorial and as the terrestrial biosphere moves into states without a present climate analogue, mechanistic understanding of ecosystem processes and their linkages with vegetation diversity and ecosystem function is vital to enable predictive capacity in our forecast tools. For example, climate change can also force surface moisture and temperature across thresholds, beyond which dryland mechanisms of ecosystem functioning, currently prevalent in dry biomes, will emerge in historically more humid biomes.
This session aims to bring together scientists interested in advancing our fundamental understanding of vegetation and whole-ecosystem processes. This year we have a special focus on dryland mechanisms (Grünzweig et al. 2022). We are interested in contributions focused on advancing process- and hypothesis-driven understanding of plant ecophysiology, biodiversity and ecosystem function. We welcome studies on a range of scales from greenhouse and mesocosm experiments to large field manipulative experiments, remote sensing studies and process-based modelling. We encourage contributions of novel ideas and hypotheses in particular those from early stage researchers and hope the session can create an environment where such ideas can be discussed freely.

Grünzweig et al. 2022. Dryland mechanisms could widely control ecosystem functioning in a drier and warmer world. Nature Ecol. Evol. 6, 1064–1076. doi 10.1038/s41559-022-01779-y

Land use and land cover change (LULCC), including land management, has the capacity to alter the climate by disrupting land-atmosphere fluxes of carbon, water and energy. Thus, there is a particular interest in understanding the role of LULCC as it relates to climate mitigation (e.g., CO2 removal from the atmosphere) and adaptation (e.g., shifts in land use or management) strategies. Recent work has highlighted tradeoffs between the biogeophysical (e.g. changes in surface properties such as albedo, roughness and evapotranspiration) and biogeochemical effects (e.g., carbon and nitrogen emissions) of land management and change on weather and climate. However, characterizing the relationship between these effects with respect to their extents and the effective net outcome remains challenging due to the overall complexity of the Earth system. Recent advances exploiting Earth system modelling and Earth observation tools are opening new possibilities to better describe LULCC and its effects at multiple temporal and spatial scales. An increasing focus on land-based mitigation and adaptation strategies to meet more stringent emissions targets has expanded the range of land management practices considered specifically for their potential to alter biogeophysical and biogeochemical cycles. This session invites studies that improve our understanding of LULCC-related climate and weather perturbations from biogeophysical and biogeochemical standpoints, either separately or focused on the intersection between these two factors. This includes studies focusing on LULCC that can inform land-based climate mitigation and adaptation policies. Observation-based and model-based analyses at local to global scales are welcome, including those that incorporate both modeling and observational approaches.

The terrestrial vegetation carbon balance is controlled not just by photosynthesis, but by respiration, carbon allocation, turnover (comprising litterfall, background mortality and disturbances) and wider vegetation dynamics. Observed, and likely future, changes in vegetation structure and functioning are the result of interactions of these processes with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nutrient availability, climate and human activities. The quantification and assessment of such changes has proven extremely challenging because of a lack of observations at large scales and over the long time periods required to evaluate trends.

This limited observation base gives rise to high uncertainty as to whether the terrestrial vegetation will continue to act as a carbon sink under future environmental changes, or whether increases in autotrophic respiration or carbon turnover might counteract this negative feedback to climate change. For instance, will accelerated background tree mortality or more frequent and more severe disturbance events (e.g. drought, fire, insect outbreaks) turn vegetation into carbon sources? How will shifts in dynamics of plant mortality, establishment and growth influence forest composition?

Uncertainties and/or data gaps in large-scale empirical products of vegetation dynamics, carbon fluxes and stocks may be overcome by extensive collections of field data and new satellite retrievals of forest biomass and other vegetation properties. Such novel datasets may be used to evaluate, develop and parametrize global vegetation models and hence to constrain present and future simulations of vegetation dynamics. Where no observations exist, exploratory modelling can investigate realistic responses and identify necessary measurements. We welcome contributions that make use of observational approaches, vegetation models, or model-data integration techniques to advance understanding of the effects of environmental change on vegetation dynamics, tree mortality and carbon stocks and fluxes at local, regional or global scales and/or at long time scales.

Climate change is affecting the dynamic feedbacks between plant, soil, and microbial communities and thus strongly influences terrestrial biogeochemical cycling. In this session we address the question: What is the impact of changing environmental conditions on the plant-soil system, and what are the resulting effects on soil biogeochemistry? Given the positive and negative feedbacks with the climate system, dynamics of soil organic matter across terrestrial ecosystems are a key focus of this session.
We invite contributions from manipulative field experiments, observations in natural-climate gradients, and modelling studies that explore the climate change impacts on plant-soil interactions, biogeochemical cycling of C, N, P, microbial diversity and decomposition processes, and deep-soil biogeochemistry. Submissions that adopt novel approaches, e.g. molecular, isotopic, or synthesize outputs from large-scale, field experiments focusing on plant-soil-microbe feedbacks to warming, wetting, drying and thawing are very welcome.

Soils sustain complex patterns of life and act as biogeochemical reactors producing and consuming a large amount of gas molecules. They play a fundamental role in the temporal evolution of the atmospheric gases concentration (greenhouse gases, biogenic volatile organic compounds, nitrous acid, isotopic composition…) and they modulate the soil pore gas concentrations affecting many soil functions, such as root and plant growth, microbial activity, and stabilization of soil organic carbon. Gases production, consumption and transport in the different soil types have then some important ecological implications for the earth system.
The factors affecting the soil gas processes range from physical soil structure (porosity, granulometry,…), type and amount of living material (microbiota, root systems), soil chemistry properties (carbon and nitrogen contents, pH,…) and soil meteorological conditions (temperature, water content,…). A large mixing of different scientific backgrounds are therefore required to improve the knowledge about their influence which is made even more difficult due to the very large spatial heterogeneity of these factors and the complexity of their interactions.
This session will be the place to present and exchange about the measurement techniques, data analyses and modelling approaches that can help to figure out the temporal and spatial variability of the production/consumption and transport of gases in soils. In addition to mechanisms related to carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), including the geochemical ones, the abstracts about volatile carbon compounds produced by plant and microbial or Helium and Radon geogenic emissions production are welcome
A special attention will be given to the researches including special water situations as edaphic drought or waterlogged soils

Tropical peatlands store around 105 Gt carbon (C ), although their total extent remains uncertain due to inadequate data. In a natural condition, tropical peatlands are long-term C stores and support livelihoods, but anthropogenic disturbances (logging, drainage, degradation, agricultural conversion, fire, resource exploration) are increasing in extent. These transformations result in high C loss, reduced C storage, increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, loss of hydrological integrity, peat subsidence, increased risk of fire. For agricultural peatlands, changes in nutrient storage and cycling necessitate fertilizer use, with enhanced emissions of N2O. Under a warming climate, these impacts are likely to intensify and reduce the benefits to rural communities. This session welcomes contributions on all aspects of tropical peatland science, including peatland mapping and monitoring; the impact of climate on past, present and future tropical peatland formation, accumulation and C dynamics; GHG and nutrient flux dynamics; management strategies for GHG emissions mitigation and the maintenance or restoration of C sequestration and storage; and valuing ancestral knowledge of peatlands. Field based, experimental and modelling studies of intact and modified systems from all tropical regions are welcomed.

Peatlands are threatened by a number of anthropogenic activities such as drainage, peat cutting, eutrophication and climate change. Peatland restoration for conservation purposes can solve many problems related to drained peatlands and has been implemented for decades now. However, innovative management measures that sustain economically viable biomass production while reducing negative environmental impacts including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, fire risk and supporting ecosystem services of organic soils are only currently studied. Those management measures include, but are not limited to, productive use of wet peatlands (paludiculture), improved water management in conventional agriculture and innovative approaches in conservation-focused rewetting projects. Besides work on global change effects on unmanaged peatlands, we invite studies addressing all types of peatland management, i.e. agriculture, forestry and “classical” restoration, their integration into GHG inventories and their impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity regionally and nationally as well as their integration into GHG inventories. Work on all spatial scales from laboratory to national level addressing biogeochemical and biological aspects and experimental and modelling studies are welcome. Furthermore, we invite contributions addressing policy coherence and identifying policy instruments for initiating and implementing new management practices on organic soils.

Managed agricultural ecosystems (grassland and cropland) and forests are an important source and/or sink for the greenhouse gases (GHG) CO2, CH4, and N2O as well as for reactive trace gases. Representative measurements and modelling under typical conditions as well as for potential mitigation options are necessary as a basis for recommendations to policy makers, farmers, and foresters.
Due to the simultaneous influence of various environmental drivers and management activities (e.g. fertilizer application, harvest, grazing) the flux patterns are often complex and difficult to attribute to individual drivers. Moreover, management related mitigation options may often result in trade-offs between different GHG or between emission of GHG and reactive gases like NH3, NOx, or VOCs. To investigate these interactions, the session addresses experimentalists and modelers working on carbon and nitrogen cycling processes and related fluxes on plot, field, landscape, and regional scale. It is open to a wide range of studies including the development and application of new devices, methods, and model approaches as well as field observations and process studies. Particularly welcome are studies on multiple gases and on the full carbon, nitrogen or GHG budgets. We also encourage contributions about the applicability and overall potential of mitigation options.

Soil systems harbor a high spatial complexity and soil architecture with diverse functions that shape biogeochemical matter cycles. In this session, we host novel studies that illuminate functional soil architectures and the spatial heterogeneity in soils from biological, physical, and chemical perspectives related to organic matter dynamics and other biogeochemical processes.

The advent of sophisticated instrumental techniques and advanced modeling tools has enabled studying soil structure, properties, and emerging functions. Spatially-explicit approaches extend our comprehension of heterogeneously distributed microbial habitats and processes, interactions of organic matter with mineral phases, and element storage. Aggregate structures and the void network of soil systems provides a dynamic scaffolding, which can protect soil components and influence local water retention and elemental distribution. Pedogenetic soil processes drive the differentiation at pedon scale and can result from a combination of small-scale processes determining soil ecosystem fluxes. Across different scale and structures, we look forward to discuss insights from microbial microenvironments via aggregated soil architecture up to the pedon scale.

This session is of interest to soil scientists with complementary biogeochemical and physical backgrounds working at different scales. The session responds to the growing awareness of the importance of spatial heterogeneity and architecture for ecosystem-relevant soil functions, such as the occlusion of organic residues, microbial colonization, provision of water and nutrients, and many more. We aim to present and discuss recent achievements, current obstacles, and future research directions to strengthen our conceptual understanding of the linkage of spatial heterogeneity and soil architecture with soil functions and organic matter dynamics across scales.

Soil organic matter (SOM) is well known to exert a great influence on physical, chemical, and biological soil properties, thus playing a very important role in agronomic production and environmental quality. Globally SOM represents the largest terrestrial organic C stock, which can have significant impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and thus on climate. The changes in soil organic C content are the result of the balance of inputs and losses, which strongly depends on the processes of organic C stabilization and protection from decomposition in the soil. This session will provide a forum for discussion of recent studies on the transformation, stabilization and sequestration mechanisms of organic C in soils, covering any physical, chemical, and biological aspects related to the selective preservation and formation of recalcitrant organic compounds, occlusion by macro and microaggregation, and chemical interaction with soil mineral particles and metal ions.

Viticulture is one of the most important agricultural sectors of Europe with an average annual production of 168 million hectoliters (54% of global consumption). The concept of “Terroir” links the quality and typicity of wine to the territory and, in particular, to specific environmental characteristics that affect the plant response (e.g. climate, geology, pedology).
The environmental factors that drive the expression of terroir vary in space and time, as well as soil and crop management.
Understanding the spatial variability of some environmental factors (e.g. soil) is very important to manage and preserve terroirs and face the current and future issues of climate change. In this sense, it is important to stress that in the last decade, the study of terroir has moved from a largely descriptive analysis of geographical variability in land characteristics to a finer elucidation of the relationships between the plant and the environment, which are influenced by agricultural practices, thus opening the door to site-specific management.
This includes more applied technical research fields, including: sensors for mapping and monitoring environmental variables, remote sensing and drones for crop monitoring, forecast models, use of microelements and isotopes for wine traceability, and metagenome approach to study the biogeochemical cycles of nutrients.
Moreover, public awareness for ecosystem functioning has led to more quantitative approaches in evidencing the relations between management and the ecosystem services of vineyard agroecosystems. Agroecology approaches in vineyard, like the use of cover crops, straw mulching, and organic amendments, are developing to improve biodiversity, organic matter, soil water and nutrient retention, and preservation from soil erosion.
On those bases, the session will address several aspects of viticultural terroirs:
1) quantifying and spatial modelling of terroir components that influence plant growth, fruit composition and quality, mostly examining climate-soil-water relationships; 2) terroir concept resilience to climate change; 3) wine traceability and zoning based on microelements and isotopes; 4) interaction between vineyard management practices and effects on soil and water quality as well as biodiversity and related ecosystem services.

In this session, we emphasize two important aspects of organic matter formation and transformation in the soil system, namely the role of plant-microbial interactions at soil interfaces and the link of matter and energy fluxes in soil systems. Firstly, we address the central role of the rhizosphere in interactions with other biogeochemical interfaces, considering the active role of roots crossing, penetrating, and even forming aggregates, bio-pores, and detritus. The key for overcoming the knowledge gaps in rhizosphere interfaces research is to link rates of matter fluxes with their spatial and temporal dynamics as well as with their associated energy fluxes. This requires concerted efforts to combine methods from different disciplines like plant genomics, imaging, soil physics, chemistry, thermodynamics and microbiology.
Secondly, the session will address how thermodynamic considerations can help to understand the transformation, degradation and stabilization of soil organic matter (SOM). SOM is increasingly seen as being comprised of biomolecules that are the result of microbial metabolism, including microbial biomass components and microbial-processed plant compounds.
Heterotrophic living microbes require energy delivered by the oxidation of organic matter. Soil systems, their biodiversity and ecosystem services are thus underpinned by mass and energy flows of organic compounds, in particular at hotspots of microbial activity, e.g. the rhizosphere. The formation of bio- and necromass as well as the storage of SOM are subjected to the laws of thermodynamics. Exploring the measurement of the SOM energy content and the regulation of the energy and matter flux processes has the potential to complete the knowledge of ecosystem control. In a wider perspective, bioenergetics and thermodynamics of soil systems may provide information on the development of sustainable and robust management of soils as ecological systems under climate change.
We therefore welcome experimental and modelling studies on rhizosphere functioning that aim at revealing spatial gradients of e.g. functional biodiversity of microorganisms, uptake and release patterns by roots, soil structure modification by root growth and feedbacks among them. This session also invites contributions presenting and discussing recent developments for the integration of thermodynamics in soil systems, including analytical developments as well as conceptual, empirical and modelling approaches.

Soil microorganisms decompose organic substrates to maintain their metabolic requirements and support growth. For growth and anabolic reactions, they require not only C and energy, but various nutrients (e.g., N and P) in stoichiometric relationships. Transformation of soil organic compounds therefore couples energy and matter flows via complex mechanisms dependent on environmental conditions and the intensity and efficiency of microbial metabolism. This coupling can be investigated from the perspective of microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE=ratio of biomass production to carbon substrate consumption), ecological stoichiometry, and microbial metabolic pathways. Elucidating the governing principles of energy and matter coupling is advancing through experimental work as well as modelling, with coupled matter and energy turnover now considered an essential feature of C cycling models.
This session invites experimental and modelling studies to understand how soil microbial life governs transformations of organic matter and the associated energy flows, with particular interest in growth, death, maintenance metabolism and necromass formation. In this context, this session also presents contributions on carbon and energy use efficiency as an indicator of microbial metabolism. These include CUE estimation in soil using advanced methods – isotope labelling, kinetic studies, isothermal calorimetry, and approaches disclosing the effect of microbial community composition and activity on CUE. We welcome innovative and interdisciplinary studies that are advancing the field of soil ecology from the understanding of biogeochemical processes to addressing global sustainability issues.

Land degradation affects more than 52 billion hectares of land around the world. This is caused -to a large extent- by anthropogenic activities such as land abandonment, mining activities, deforestation, and inadequate land use and management. Disturbance or insufficient rebuilding of the soil physicochemical and biological characteristics can modify the ecosystem functions and services. In the absence of appropriate restoration, soils and ecosystems would remain in a disturbed state or continue to decline. Therefore, restoration and rehabilitation of degraded soils is critical to create healthy and functional ecosystems that support essential functions and services.
In this session, we welcome contributions covering experimental, observational, and theoretical studies this area of research. Topics of interest (although not limited to) are causes and impacts of land degradation and remedial actions and strategies for soil restoration and rehabilitation at local, regional or global scales.

Soils largely contribute to sustain agro-systems production and provide many ecosystem services that are essential for addressing sustainable land and water management. Management of both soil and water resources is a primary socio-economic concern that requires a detailed description of the physical and biological process that occur into the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum system. Nevertheless, measuring soil state variables and hydraulic parameters is often difficult due to the many complex nonlinear physical, chemical and biological interactions that simultaneously control the transfer of heat and mass. Infiltration experiments have been proposed as a simple mean to estimate soil hydraulic properties but their effectiveness is hampered by the effects of spatio-temporal variability across scales. High-resolution measurements of soil state variables, both over space and time, are thus crucial to describe and analyze soil hydraulic properties adequately and understand flow processes, including preferential flows.
The session focuses on the principles, capabilities, and applications of different techniques for monitoring state variables of soil and estimating soil hydraulic properties and accounting for preferential flows. Specific topics include, but are not limited to:

• Multiple measurement techniques and modelling approaches for determining state variables of soil;
• Innovative soil-water measurements techniques for linking the interactions of soil with plant and atmosphere compartments;
• Field infiltration techniques from a wide variety of devices in combination with dielectric and geophysical methods (i.e., TDR, FDR, GPR, ERT, etc.);
• Understanding the effect of physical processes and geochemical processes on the dynamics of macropore-fracture and preferential flows across scales;
• Understanding the contribution of preferential flow to flow and mass transport in the vadose zone;
• New or revisited numerical and analytical models to account for physical, chemical and biological interaction in the soil-water flow models (multiple-porosity, permeability, hydrophobicity, clogging, shrinking-swelling, or biofilm development);
• Use of pedotransfer functions based on limited available in-situ measurements to estimate parameters that describe soil hydro-physical and thermal characteristics;
• Multi-data source methodologies also in combination with modelling for assessing the soil physics dynamics at different temporal and spatial scales.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is the key water flux at the interface of soil, vegetation and atmosphere. ET is difficult to measure directly, therefore a range of methods have been developed within different research disciplines to estimate ET. These methods cover different scales and contain measurement-specific uncertainties.

In-situ measurements include for example lysimeters, sap flow sensors, eddy covariance stations, scintillometers and approaches like the Bowen ratio method and others to estimate ET from ground-based measurements. However, estimating and scaling in-situ ET is prone to large method-specific uncertainties which are rarely communicated across the different disciplines. This is problematic if in-situ measurements are to be compared, combined or scaled up to match the grid resolution of remote sensing products or models.

Remote sensing of actual ET needs to be estimated and precisely mapped due to the broadening scope in the demand for more accurate and longer-term ET estimation in different fields of hydrology, water management, agriculture, forestry, and urban greening. Over the last five decades, numerous spaceborne and airborne sensors have been used to model, map, monitor and forecast ET at different spatiotemporal scales in various climates and eco-geographical regions for a range of vegetative land covers. Recent advances in image processing and artificial intelligence (machine learning, deep learning, etc.), as well as the growing number of satellites and sensors, have improved the accessibility and quality of images, which open more avenues for regular updating and upscaling.

This session addresses ET estimation with both in-situ and remote sensing methods. We invite contributions that (1) assess and compare established and new in-situ and remote sensing ET estimates, (2) evaluate and enhance accuracy, and address uncertainty in the respective methods, (3) bridge spatio-temporal scales in the different ET estimates or (4) incorporate remote sensing and in-situ measurements into process-based modelling approaches.

Peatlands develop in specific hydrological settings and are thus sensitive to changes in climate and hydrological boundary conditions. The hydrology of peatlands is fundamental to their functions and development. Soil hydrological properties can change drastically after disturbances such as drainage, permafrost thaw, or mechanical compaction, causing challenges for both model parameterization and re-wetting measures. Pristine peatlands offer and regulate many ecosystem services such as biodiversity, carbon storage, and nutrient retention. Hydrology is a key control for a number of these services. Furthermore, the effects of peatlands (both pristine and disturbed) on flood retention, support of low flows and regional climate are much debated. As hydrological and biotic processes in peatlands are strongly coupled, estimating the eco-hydrological response of peatlands under climate change and linking it to vegetation development and greenhouse gas emissions is a demanding task for modelers.

This session addresses peatlands in all latitudes, and we especially encourage papers on permafrost and tropical peatlands for which field studies are scarce and the inclusion into Earth system models is largely pending. We welcome submissions on: (1) hydrological processes operating in all types of peatlands (pristine, disturbed, degraded, drained, managed, rehabilitated or re-wetted) in northern and tropical latitudes; and (2) the first-order control of peatland hydrology on all kinds of peatland functions.

We aim to boost knowledge transfer across spatial/temporal scales and methods; from the pore to the global scale, including laboratory, field, remote sensing, and modeling studies on hydrological, hydrochemical, biogeochemical, ecohydrological or geophysical topics, as well as ecosystem service assessments.

Vegetation is a structured and complex layer that importantly affects Earth’s surface processes. Hydrologically, the canopy intercepts precipitation (eventually evaporating) and redistributes it into throughfall and stemflow. Along those pathways, matter deposited on or produced in the canopy is transported to the forest floor. Canopies also interact with radiation and atmospheric conditions, impacting transpiration and root water uptake. Such, vegetation and canopies affect balances of water, matter and energy as well as their spatio-temporal distribution and generate feedbacks in ecosystems, water bodies and atmosphere. Moreover, plants absorb the energy of falling raindrops, reduce wind speed and contribute to soil stabilization through their root system. In this way, vegetation impacts the occurrence of erosion events. Plant traits, depending on their characteristics, can be erosion-reducing or erosion-promoting. Also, significant differences in erosion can be observed between and within different plant communities and developmental stages of the plant cover. Various mechanisms behind these complex processes are still not understood in detail and require the interdisciplinary expertise of soil scientists, geomorphologists, ecologists and botanists, as well as (eco-)hydrologists. This session broadly invites contributions from various disciplines to illustrate recent progress in research on vegetation and canopy impacts on soil erosion, soils, biogeochemical and hydrological processes of all (eco)systems by experimental work or modeling.

Tree rings are one of nature’s most versatile archives, providing insight into past environmental conditions at annual and intra-annual resolution and from local to global scales. Besides being valued proxies for historical climate, tree rings are also important indicators of plant physiological responses to changing environments and of long-term ecological processes. In this broad context we welcome contributions using one or more of the following approaches to either study the impact of environmental change on the growth and physiology of trees and forest ecosystems, or to assess and reconstruct past environmental change: (i) dendrochronological methods including studies based on tree-ring width, MXD or Blue Intensity, (ii) stable isotopes in tree rings and related plant compounds, (iii) dendrochemistry, (iv) quantitative wood anatomy, (v) ecophysiological data analyses, and (vi) mechanistic modeling, all across temporal and spatial scales.

Phenological changes induced by ongoing climate change are affecting species, ecosystems, and even the global climate by altering species performance, species interactions (potential mismatches and new opportunities in the food web), and water and carbon cycles. Observations of plant and animal phenology as well as remote sensing and modeling studies document complex interactions and raise many open questions about the future sustainability of species and ecosystems.
In this session we invite all contributions that address seasonality changes based on plant and animal phenological observations, pollen monitoring, historical documentary sources, or seasonality measurements using climate data, remote sensing, flux measurements, modeling studies or experiments. We also welcome contributions addressing cross-disciplinary perspectives and international collaborations and program-building initiatives including citizen science networks and data analyses from these networks.
This session is organized by a consortium representing the International Society of Biometeorology (Phenology Commission), the Pan-European Phenology Network - PEP725, the Swiss Academy of Science SCNAT, the TEMPO French Phenology Network and the USA National Phenology Network.

Soil is the largest carbon (C) reservoir in terrestrial ecosystems and soil organic carbon (SOC) is the basis for soil’s biodiversity, health and fertility. Furthermore, enhancing SOC storage in agricultural soils is key for food security, provision of the soil-related ecosystem services, and climate change mitigation.

Investing in productive, highly resilient agriculture, based on appropriate land and soil management requires the knowledge base on drivers and processes controlling soil C storage and its dynamics in agroecosystems. Thus, this session will provide a forum to exchange knowledge about the key mechanisms and proxies controlling dynamics of soil C (both organic and inorganic) in cropping systems and natural/semi-natural areas.
Studies, opinions and other contributions in this session will aim to a wide range of topics related to SOC and soil organic carbon (SIC) and soil traits depending on SOC and SIC. These topics may also include soil fertility, provision of ecosystem services, and their changes.

Types of contribution appreciated include, but are not limited to, definitive and intermediate results; project outcomes; proposal of methods or sampling and modelling strategies, and the assessment of their effectiveness; projection of previous results at the light of climate change and climatic extremes; literature surveys, reviews, meta-analysis; and opinions. These works will be evaluated at the light of the organization of a special issue in an impacted journal

The present context of accelerated changes in both climate and land use imposes an unprecedent pressure on a number of vulnerable ecosystems including wetlands, forests and rangelands, in which vegetation closely interacts and coevolves with soils and landforms. Complex interactions between climate, soils and biotic factors are involved in the development of landform-soil-vegetation feedbacks and play an important role in making ecosystems resilient to disturbances. In addition, large shifts in the distribution of vegetation and soils are associated with losses of ecosystem services (including carbon capture), frequently involving thresholds of ecosystem stability and nonlinear responses to both human and climatic pressures.

This session looks back on the successful and exciting sessions on landform-soil-vegetation coevolution and ecosystem stability annually held at EGU since 2013 and will focus on ecogeomorphological and ecohydrological aspects of landscapes and wathersheds (including their connectivity), the conservation of both soil and water resources, and the restoration of ecosystem services and functions.

We welcome theoretical, modelling and empirical studies as well as scaling approaches from the soil profile to the landscape scale addressing soil structure and its functions, including carbon and nutrient cycling, the distribution of vegetation and their coevolving landforms, and also contributions with a wide appreciation of the soil erosion-vegetation relationships that rule the formation of broad, landscape-level spatial organization. We also welcome studies describing the implications of these spatial patterns for the resilience, stability and restoration of ecosystems under the pressure of climate change and/or human disturbances.

We are proud to announce that Prof. Susana Bautista (Head of the Ramon Margalef Multidisciplinary Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Alicante, Spain) has agreed to participate in the session with the invited talk "Within-patch plant diversity modulates the hydrological source-sink dynamics of dryland landscapes".

Soil Health is the capacity of a soil to function within ecosystem and land-use boundaries to sustain biological productivity, maintain environmental quality, and promote plant, animal, and consequently human health. Global change factors (warming, extreme events, elevated CO2, droughts, floods, etc.) as well as human activities (land use change, intensive fertilization, pesticide application, mismanagement of landfills, nuclear accidents, etc.) negatively affect this soil health. The initial modification of physical and chemical soil properties may have dramatic effects on soil biota – the main driver of all biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nutrients. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) defines “Organic agriculture as a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects"

We invite field, laboratory and modelling studies on the soil health parameters, such as SOC content, basal microbial respiration, enzyme activities, and others, which are affected by global change and human activities. This session considers the contributions on organic farming in relation to soil changes, soil productivity, plant protection, healthy food, food quality or socio-economic aspects. Studies focused on optimal energy efficiency, carbon and water footprint, greenhouse gasses (GHG) and soil nutrient balancing as indicators of sustainable agricultural practices, are also welcomed. Research conducted on different continents will be shown in order to know the sustainability of organic agriculture and soil health under different environmental, social and economic conditions. Abstracts covering studies from micro to a global scale are highly appreciated. All these studies could provide a robust scientific basis for governmental agricultural policies development and decision tools for stakeholders.