Fire is an essential feature of many ecosystems and an important component of the Earth system. Climate, vegetation, and human activity regulate fire occurrence and spread, but fires also feedback to them in multiple ways, resulting in changing fire regimes in many regions of the world. This session welcomes contributions that explore the role of fire in the Earth system at any temporal and spatial scale using modeling, field and laboratory observations, proxy-records including tree fire scars, sedimentary charcoal cores, ice cores, speleothems, and/or remote sensing. We encourage abstracts that advance our understanding on (1) fire related emissions (e.g. emission factors, emission height, smoke transport), (2) spatial and temporal changes of fire regimes in the past, present, and future, (3) fire products and models, and their validation, error/bias assessment and correction, (4) analytical tools designed to enhance situational awareness among fire practitioners and early warning systems. We are also welcoming submissions on fire related changes (5) in weather, climate, as well as atmospheric chemistry and circulation, (6) vegetation composition and structure, (7) cryosphere (e.g. permafrost, sea ice), (2) biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and trace elements, (8) soil functioning and soil organic matter dynamics, as well as (9) effects of fires on humans (e.g., impact of fire on air and water quality, freshwater resources, human health, land use and land cover change, fire management).

Early career researchers and underrepresented groups in the field are strongly encouraged to apply.

Changes in cloud cover and emissions of natural and anthropogenic aerosols can significantly impact the biosphere through modifying climate (i.e., temperature, precipitation, quantity and quality of surface solar radiation), ozone production, nutrient deposition, etc. Meanwhile, the altered biosphere can further regulate the climate system by affecting mass and energy exchanges between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere through biophysical (altering surface albedo, evapotranspiration, etc.) and biochemical (changing carbon budget) processes. Clouds, aerosols, and interactions with the biosphere remain large sources of uncertainty in our understanding of the drivers of climate change. Thus, accurately describing these processes and feedbacks will help reduce uncertainties in climate projections, inform local to regional air quality control policies and better constrain the impacts of solar radiation modification strategies in geoengineering.

This session also highlights the interactions between tropospheric ozone and the vegetation. Ozone is a secondary pollutant and climate forcing agent. It is well-established that ozone damages vegetation (plant and crop) at concentrations observed in the present-day. This has the potential to change the land carbon budget and reduce crop yields, with further changes possible in the future. Therefore, in the context of climate change, it is essential to accurately measure ozone levels, its precursors, and study the ozone-vegetation interactions that influence the ecosystem carbon cycle.

This session aims to bring together researchers working on the interaction between the biosphere, clouds, aerosols and ozone. We welcome contributions from scientists investigating the mechanisms and quantifying the impacts of cloud-, aerosol- and ozone-induced changes on the biosphere, as well as their feedback to the climate system. We also welcome studies on solar radiation modification, especially those focusing on the biosphere. Studies across scales (local to global), over land or ocean and using various techniques (observational, experimental and modelling) are welcome.

Anthropogenic disturbance of the global nitrogen (N) cycle has more than doubled the amount of reactive N circulating in the terrestrial biosphere alone. Exchange of reactive/non-reactive nitrogen gases between land and atmosphere are strongly affecting Earth’s atmospheric composition, air quality, global warming, climate change and human health.
Soil denitrification as a key process of terrestrial N cycle is poorly quantified despite a long research history, but progress is expected from focused effort in recent decades to improve techniques for measuring and modelling N2 and N2O fluxes. Yet we still lack a comprehensive, quantitative understanding of denitrification rates in soils due to methodical limitation, its complex controls and the spatio-temporal variability on a field or landscape scale. Due to the lack of suitable data-sets, process-based denitrification models have rarely been validated and results of their application on site and regional scales are highly uncertain.
This session seeks to improve our understanding of a) how intensification of reactive N use, land management and climate change affects the pools and fluxes of nitrogen in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, b) how reactive N enrichment of land and water will affect the future carbon sink of natural ecosystems as well as atmospheric exchanges of reactive (NO, N2O, NH3, HONO, NO2 and non-reactive N (N2) gases with implications for global warming, climate change and air quality, and c) how quantification and prediction of soil denitrification can be improved.
We welcome contributions covering a wide range of experimental and modelling studies, which covers microbes-mediated and physico-chemical transformations and transport of nitrogen across the land-water-air continuum in natural ecosystems from local to regional and global scales. We also invite contributions on methodical advances in measuring denitrification in soils addressing N2 and N2O fluxes with a focus on controlling factors; reports on novel methods; process-based modelling of denitrification at various scales; linking denitrification rates to parameters of the denitrifying community.

Phosphorus (P) is an essential element for life on Earth and is tightly cycled within the biosphere. Throughout geological history, P availability has regulated biological productivity with impacts on the global carbon cycle. Today, human activities are significantly changing the natural cycling of P. Phosphate mining has depleted geological P reserves, while increased inputs of P to terrestrial ecosystems have enhanced fluxes of P to lakes and the oceans.

Direct anthropogenic perturbations of the P cycle, coupled with other human-induced stresses, have impacted numerous environments. Forest ecosystems may be losing their ability to recycle P efficiently, due to excessive N input, extensive biomass removal, and climatic stress. Soils, which serve as the biogeochemical fulcrum of the terrestrial P cycle, have been greatly altered by fertilizer use in recent decades. Changes in the P cycle on land impact on the magnitude and timing of P fluxes into aquatic ecosystems, influencing their trophic state. Burial in sediments returns P to the geological sink, eventually forming economically viable P deposits. Throughout the P cycle, redox conditions play a key role in transformations and mobility of P.

This interdisciplinary session invites contributions to the study of P from across the geosciences, and aims to foster links between researchers working on different aspects of the P cycle. We target a balanced session giving equal weight across the continuum of environments in the P cycle, from forests, soils and groundwater, through lakes, rivers and estuaries, to oceans, marine sediments and geological P deposits. We welcome studies of both past and present P cycling, with a focus on novel techniques and approaches.

The Amazon forest is the world’s largest intact forest landscape. Due to its large biodiversity, carbon storage capacity, and role in the hydrological cycle, it is an extraordinary interdisciplinary natural laboratory of global significance. In the Amazon rainforest biome, it is possible to study atmospheric composition and processes, biogeochemical cycling and energy fluxes at the geo-, bio-, atmosphere interface under near-pristine conditions and under anthropogenic disturbance of varying. Understanding its current functioning at process up to biome level in its pristine and degraded state is elemental for predicting its response upon changing climate and land use, and the impact this will have on local up to global scale.
This session aims at bringing together scientists who investigate the functioning of the Amazon and comparable forest landscapes across spatial and temporal scales by means of remote and in-situ observational, experimental, modelling, and theoretical studies. Particularly welcome are also presentations of novel, interdisciplinary approaches and techniques that bear the potential of paving the way for a paradigm shift.

The Paris Agreement on Climate sets the international objective to keep climate warming well below two degrees. This extraordinary challenge requires a dramatic improvement of current scientific capabilities to estimate the budgets and their trends of greenhouse gases (GHG) at regional scale, and how they link up to the global growth rates of the major GHGs (N2O, CH4 and CO2). This session aims to bring together studies to help understand and quantify regional budgets, trends and variability, and drivers of major GHG (N2O, CH4 and CO2) through the analyses of emissions inventories, field and remotely-sensed observations, terrestrial and ocean biogeochemical modeling, and atmospheric inverse modeling. We encourage contributions from the REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes (RECCAP2), a new global assessment of the Global Carbon Project, as well as studies combining different datasets and approaches at multi-scales from regional to global.

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, making climate change’s polar effects more intense than anywhere else in the world. The Arctic accounts for half of the organic carbon stored in soils. There is high confidence that the thaw of terrestrial permafrost will lead to carbon release, but only low confidence regarding timing, magnitude and relative role of different GHG’s according to the sixth assessment report of IPCC (2021).

Therefore, in this session we aim to bring together biogeochemical science in high latitude regions. From small scale processes such as those measured by flux chambers, to site-scale eddy covariance fluxes, to regional scale atmospheric carbon cycle measurements, all the way to pan Arctic monitoring by satellites. We are interested in both measurements of high latitude carbon and nutrient cycles as well as environmental changes.
In this session we encourage abstracts with new findings on high latitude biogeochemical research such as CO2, CH4 or N2O fluxes, but also groundwater nutrient flow or atmospheric concentrations and their sources. We also encourage submissions on environmental change topics such as Arctic greening, wetlands extent change, and permafrost degradation, and ways to map these changes based on remote sensing.

Finally, large-scale high latitude projects such as: AMPAC a transatlantic initiative by NASA and ESA, which brings together a wide range of high latitude CH4 focused activities from Europe as well as North America. But also projects such as ABoVE, Permafrost Pathways, Q-Arctic,. Are welcome.

The use of geological evidence may help the judicial system to solve cases of homicides, corpse concealments, hit-and-run accidents, kidnappings, sexual assaults, geohazard problematics, environmental damages, animal maltreatment, wildlife crimes, gemstone and fossil frauds. Forensic geologists may be supported by a team of experts during the scientific investigation.
Earth and Natural Sciences may be simultaneously involved in a holistic approach for analyzing inorganic, anthropogenic, and organic materials found on the outdoor crime scenes. These sciences may also be devoted to environmental issues due to the human-environmental interactions responsible for crucial human-driven changes in the Anthropocene and hazards in which biodiversity, climate, and public health and safety are at stake.
Different analytical methods aim to obtain information on the compatibility degree among unknown and known samples and the possible provenance.
Based on the above, different experts may collaborate with geologists and investigate geological evidence and environmental issues, together in research teams. Geologists approaching forensic geology need to master sedimentology, micropaleontology, physical geology, petrography, gemology, geochemistry, hydrogeology, soil sciences, geomorphology, stratigraphy, regional geology, remote sensing, and applied geology and geophysics. Botanists address their investigation in forensic botany by studying plant ecology, vegetal anatomy, systematics, palynology, algology, and plant DNA in soil/sediment. On the other hand, entomologists approach forensic entomology by studying chemistry, biology, human/animal health, molecular science, and animal DNA in soil/sediment.
We encourage submission of studies presenting new insights derived from different inter-disciplinary- and transdisciplinary perspectives, including earth, natural, and environmental sciences (geology, geophysics, geochemistry, ecology, geological medicine, botany, entomology, ecology, and climatology applied to the Anthropocene Epoch), legal medicine, geological medicine. Particular attention will be given to the following topics: comparative analyses; reconstruction of walking in crime scenes; search for clandestine graves; geographical profiling; gemstone frauds; pollutants in groundwaters and soil matrices and environmental forensics; ecological and human health risks.

This session is open to all contributions in biogeochemistry and ecology where stable isotope techniques are used as analytical tools, with foci both on stable isotopes of light elements (C, H, O, N, S, …) and new systems (clumped and metal isotopes). We welcome studies from both terrestrial and aquatic (including marine) environments as well as methodological, experimental and theoretical studies that introduce new approaches or techniques (including natural abundance work, labelling studies, multi-isotope approaches).

As part of this session we invite contributions from the field and laboratory experiments and the very latest instrument developments as well as theoretical and modeling activities that advance our understanding of biogeochemical and atmospheric processes using stable isotopes of light elements (C, H, O, N) as well as other novel tracers (such as carbonyl sulfide (COS)), for example:

- Stable isotopes in carbon dioxide (CO2), water (H2O), methane (CH4), carbonyl sulfide (COS), and nitrous oxide (N2O)

- Novel tracers and biological analogues, such as carbonyl sulfide (COS)

- Polyisotopocules ("clumped isotopes")

- Intramolecular stable isotope distributions ("isotopomer abundances")

- Analytical, method and modeling developments

- Flux measurements

- Quantification of isotope effects

- Non-mass-dependent isotopic fractionation and related isotope anomalies

This session aims to bring together scientists from different fields applying single and dual oxygen and hydrogen isotope approaches on environmental-derived compounds for the reconstruction of climatic and biological processes that go beyond standard isotope analyses of water. We invite researchers working on different compounds (e.g. lipids, (hemi-) cellulose, non-structural carbohydrates) from aquatic (e.g., fish, microbes and seaweed) and terrestrial (e.g., grasses, mosses and trees) origins across all spatiotemporal scales and archives (e.g. herbarium, peat, sediments, loess and tree rings). We also encourage people working with all techniques (IRMS-, NMR- or spectroscopy-based) to present advances in methods, as well as researchers focusing on improving oxygen and hydrogen isotope-based models to discuss their approaches. In summary, the session will offer an overview on oxygen and hydrogen applications across different ecosystems in order to facilitate the interpretation of compound-specific isotope patterns.

Natural organic matter (NOM) is ubiquitous and astonishingly complex, and this complexity may be pivotal in sustaining various ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling and carbon storage. For example, microbial uptake, respiration and release of organic matter ultimately control a carbon reservoir larger than all living biomass on earth combined. Organic molecules such as DNA and biomarkers have received increasing attention as tools to reconstruct long-term changes in biodiversity, microbial element cycling, organic matter composition, and environmental constraints.
Our session will thus focus on the following topics:
• NOM biogeochemistry
Modern geochemical tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry or liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry show great prospects for revealing the multifaceted nature of NOM, i.e., attributing its variety of functions to the extremely diverse molecular composition of NOM. Key questions include: How can we disentangle the properties, functions, and responses of NOM in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and which new techniques and experimental setups can help us to achieve this?
• Microbe-DOM interactions
Understanding the main mechanisms regulating the biological availability of DOM is one of the most challenging, but pressing issues in environmental science. In biogeochemical modelling studies, DOM is still over-simplistically parameterized, and linking DOM composition to more easily measured proxies from optical measurements (CDOM/FDOM) remains challenging. Contributions include experimental studies and field observations along environmental gradients, data science approaches focusing on algorithm development, studies linking microbial and biogeochemical data, as well as biogeochemical modelling approaches.
• Biomarkers and environmental DNA
Recent developments in the analysis of biomarkers (lipids, photo-pigments, sterols, etc.) and DNA extracted from environmental samples enable unique insights into the history of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Molecular techniques offer a differentiated view on the climate-environment-human nexus through investigation of leads/lags in specific proxies resolving cultivated plants, domestic animals, industrial activity, and climate. This section targets advances and challenges when using biomolecules for paleo-environmental reconstructions and covers novel analytical approaches and data analysis.

Carbonate minerals are ubiquitous throughout all geological environments in the Earth`s crust, forming via biogenic, marine, diagenetic, hydrothermal, magmatic, and metamorphic processes. Therefore, refining our understanding of carbonate formation can contribute towards addressing important geological and societal problems, such as the Earth`s past and present carbon cycle or the exploration of critical raw materials. The study of carbonate minerals is one that crosses multiple sectors and disciplines, with several novel applications emerging in recent years. Similarly, recent analytical developments allow for the application of geochronological, trace element and isotope geochemical techniques across a wide range of scales and sample materials. To keep track of these emerging techniques, this session aims to bring together an interdisciplinary community working both on method development and on the application of techniques investigating carbonate minerals. We invite geoscientists from all fields (e.g., paleoceanology, economic geology, igneous petrology, carbon storage) to contribute to this session by presenting their research in carbonate geochronology (e.g., U-Pb dating), carbonate trace element geochemistry (e.g., rare earth elements), and carbonate isotope geochemistry (e.g., strontium, clumped isotopes).

Finding the best method both to monitor environmental processes occurring at the earth surface and to explore data related to them is a challenge for many scientists. The spatial and temporal extension of a process and the observation scale chosen can strongly conditionate the fully understanding of the phenomenon itself. Further, the structural peculiarities of the geochemical data, describing the composition of the matrices used to monitor the environment, are often capable to hidden meaningful relationships among elements in favor of spurious correlations dependent on the so-called closure effect affecting them.
The intrinsic aim of this session is to propose a comparison of methods, including both innovative monitoring and data elaboration techniques, with the purpose of providing a real time review of the pros and the counter associated to the different approaches reported. All the scientists using geochemical data to evaluate the impact of human activities on the environment and aiming at finding the “best solution” for the spatial and temporal discrimination of contamination are invited to contribute to this session.
Studies on single matrices are welcome although research based on the outcomes of integrated plans based on several matrices, including biological ones, would be of greater interest. Similarly, contributions focusing on data elaboration techniques using multivariate analysis and machine learning are encouraged especially if they consider the compositional nature of geochemical data.

The MacGyver session focuses on novel sensors made, or data sources unlocked, by scientists. All geoscientists are invited to present:
- new sensor systems, using technologies in novel or unintended ways,
- new data storage or transmission solutions sending data from the field with LoRa, WIFI, GSM, or any other nifty approach,
- started initiatives (e.g., Open-Sensing.org) that facilitate the creation and sharing of novel sensors, data acquisition and transmission systems.

Connected a sensor to an Arduino or Raspberri Pi? Used the new Lidar in the new iPhone to measure something relevant for hydrology? 3D printed an automated water quality sampler? Or build a Cloud Storage system from Open Source Components? Show it!

New methods in hydrology, plant physiology, seismology, remote sensing, ecology, etc. are all welcome. Bring prototypes and demonstrations to make this the most exciting Poster Only (!) session of the General Assembly.

The MacGyver session this year teams up with the Frontiers in river flow monitoring session. The 'author in attendance' blocks are in the early morning and late afternoon. In between those two block we organize a field session with hands-on on different state of the art hydrometry techniques. Bring your own measurement system and show case it, or join us to see others demonstrate their devices! Details on this field trip:

Monday, 24th of April, 10:30 to 16:00 hrs
Departure by bus at 10:30 hrs from AVC Center
Platz der Vereinten Nationen close to underground station Kaisermühlen VIC
Lunch and beverages will be provided

If you are interested please send us an email: pena@photrack.ch

This session is co-sponsered by MOXXI, the working group on novel observational methods of the IAHS.

The Quaternary Period (last 2.6 million years) is characterized by frequent and abrupt climate swings that were accompanied by rapid environmental change. Studying these changes requires accurate and precise dating methods that can be effectively applied to environmental archives. A range of different methods or a combination of various dating techniques can be used, depending on the archive, time range, and research question.
Radiocarbon (14C) in particular is a key environmental tracer that can be widely applied in geochronology, environmental, and climate sciences. It is an invaluable tool to understand the global carbon cycle, as it can be used to trace the transfer of carbon between the atmosphere and other reservoirs, e.g., soils, oceans, and the geosphere, and to understand the impact of anthropogenic perturbations on these reservoirs.

With this session, we aim at bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on dating and understanding climate archives of the Quaternary Period. Our session will focus on the application of geochronometers on one hand, as well as on the use of radiocarbon from natural reservoirs and archives that improve our understanding of the carbon cycle. In particular, we look forward to discussing (1) experimental and analytical advances (e.g. in sample preparation and measurement techniques); (2) methods that reduce, quantify and express dating uncertainties in any dating method, including high-resolution radiocarbon approaches; (3) new insights into the global carbon cycle, e.g., storage times in soils, sediment dispersal, ocean circulation, or carbon transfer between reservoirs; (4) general geochronological applications such as long-term landscape evolution, rates of geomorphological processes, and chronologies for records of climate change.

Agrogeophysics harnesses geophysical methods such as ground-penetrating radar, electrical imaging, seismic,... from hand-held over drone to satellite-borne, to characterize patterns or processes in the soil-plant continuum of interest for agronomic management. These methods help develop sustainable agricultural practices by providing minimally-invasive, spatially consistent, multi-scale, and temporally-resolved information of processes in agro- ecosystems that is inaccessible by traditional monitoring techniques. The aim of this session is to feature applications of geophysical methods in agricultural research and/or show methodologies to overcome their inherent limitations and challenges. We welcome contributions monitoring soil or plant properties and states revealing information relevant for agricultural management; studies developing and using proximal or remote sensing techniques for mapping or monitoring soil-water-plant interactions; work focused on bridging the scale gap between these multiple techniques; or work investigating pedophysical relationships to better understand laboratory-scale links between sensed properties and soil properties and states of interest. Submissions profiting on data fusion, utilizing innovative modeling tools for interpretation, and demonstrating novel acquisition or processing techniques are encouraged.

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.

Our ability to understand biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in aquatic ecosystems has evolved enormously thanks to advancements in in situ and laboratory measurement techniques. We are now able to provide a detailed characterisation of aquatic organic matter with spectroscopic and chromatographic methods and collect data on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in relation to highly dynamic hydrological events thanks to automated in situ instruments. Therefore, the aim of this session is to demonstrate how this methodological advancement improves our understanding of coupled hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes in aquatic environments controlling the fate of organic matter, nutrients and other chemicals.

Specifically, our ability to characterise different fractions of natural organic matter and organic carbon has increased thanks to a range of analytical methods e.g. fluorescence and absorbance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and chromatography combined with advanced data mining tools. Matching the water quality measurement interval with the timescales of hydrological responses (from minutes to hours) thanks to automated in situ wet-chemistry analysers, optical sensors and lab-on-a-chip instruments has led to discovery of new hydrochemical and biogeochemical patterns in aquatic environments e.g. concentration-discharge hysteresis and diurnal cycles. We need to understand further how hydrochemical and ecological processes control those patterns, how different biogeochemical cycles are linked in aquatic environments and how human activities disturb those biogeochemical cycles by emitting excess amounts of nutrients to aquatic systems. In particular, there is a growing need to better characterise the origins, delivery pathways, transformations and environmental fate of organic matter and nutrients in aquatic environments along with identification of robust numerical tools for advanced data processing and modelling.

As current aquatic biogeochemical cycles processes alter with emerging climate change and extreme events, this session welcomes also studies presenting approaches and tools to monitor, model, and predict water quality under climate change in individual water bodies and parsimonious conceptual models on large river basin-, regional and global scales.

The coastal ocean has been increasingly recognized as a dynamic component of the global carbon budget. This session aims at fostering our understanding of the roles of coastal environments and of exchange processes, both natural or perturbed, along the terrestrial / coastal sea / open ocean continuum in global biogeochemical cycles. During the session recent advancements in the field of coastal and shelf biogeochemistry will be discussed. Contributions focusing on carbon and nutrient and all other element's cycles in coastal, shelf and shelf break environments, both pelagic and sedimentary, are invited.

This session is multidisciplinary and is open to observational, experimental, modelling and theoretical studies in order to promote the dialogue. The session will comprise subsections on coastal carbon storage, on benthic biogeochemical processes and on biological and ecological experimental approaches in marine bogeosciences.

The session is co-sponsored by JpGU.

The Indian Ocean is unique among the other tropical ocean basins due to the seasonal reversal of monsoon winds and concurrent ocean currents, lack of steady easterlies that result in a relatively deep thermocline along the equator, low-latitude connection to the neighboring Pacific and a lack of northward heat export due to the Asian continent. These characteristics shape the Indian Ocean’s air-sea interactions, variability, as well as its impacts and predictability in tropical and extratropical regions on (intra)seasonal, interannual, decadal timescales and beyond. They also make the basin particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change, as well as related extreme weather and climate events, and their impacts for surrounding regions, home to a third of the global population. Advances have recently been made in our understanding of the Indian Ocean’s circulation, interactions with adjacent ocean basins, and its role in regional and global climate. Nonetheless, significant gaps remain in understanding, observing, modeling, and predicting Indian Ocean variability and change across a range of timescales.

This session invites contributions based on observations, modelling, theory, and palaeo proxy reconstructions in the Indian Ocean that focus on recent observed and projected changes in Indian Ocean physical and biogeochemical properties and their impacts on ecological processes, diversity in Indian Ocean modes of variability (e.g., Indian Ocean Dipole, Indian Ocean Basin Mode, Madden-Julian Oscillation) and their impact on predictions, interactions and exchanges between the Indian Ocean and other ocean basins, as well as links between Indian Ocean variability and monsoon systems across a range of timescales. We encourage submissions on weather and climate extremes of societal relevance in the Indian Ocean and surrounding regions, including evaluating climate risks, vulnerability, and resilience.

We also welcome contributions that address research on the Indian Ocean grand challenges highlighted in the IndOOS Decadal Review, and as formulated by CLIVAR, the Sustained Indian Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (SIBER), the International Indian Ocean Expedition 2 (IIOE-2), findings informed by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project v6 on past, present and future variability and change in the Indian Ocean climate system, and contributions making use of novel methodologies such as machine learning.

The rapid decline of the Arctic sea ice in the last decade is a dramatic indicator of climate change. The Arctic sea ice cover is now thinner, weaker and drifts faster. Freak heatwaves are common. On land, the permafrost is dramatically thawing, glaciers are disappearing, and forest fires are raging. The ocean is also changing: the volume of freshwater stored in the Arctic has increased as have the inputs of coastal runoff from Siberia and Greenland and the exchanges with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As the global surface temperature rises, the Arctic Ocean is speculated to become seasonally ice-free by the mid 21st century, which prompts us to revisit our perceptions of the Arctic system as a whole. What could the Arctic Ocean look like in the future? How are the present changes in the Arctic going to affect and be affected by the lower latitudes? What aspects of the changing Arctic should observational, remote sensing and modelling programmes address in priority?
In this session, we invite contributions from a variety of studies on the recent past, present and future Arctic. We encourage submissions examining interactions between the ocean, atmosphere and sea ice, on emerging mechanisms and feedbacks in the Arctic and on how the Arctic influences the global ocean. Submissions taking a cross-disciplinary, system approach and focussing on emerging cryospheric, oceanic and biogeochemical processes and their links with land are particularly welcome.
The session supports the actions of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) towards addressing challenges for sustainable development in the Arctic and its diverse regions. We aim to promote discussions on the future plans for Arctic Ocean modelling and measurement strategies, and encourages submissions on the results from IPCC CMIP and the recent observational programs, such as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), which cosponsors this session.

The ocean surface mixed layer mediates the transfer of heat, freshwater, momentum and trace gases between atmosphere, sea ice and ocean, thus playing a central role in the dynamics of our climate. This session will focus on the surface mixed layer globally, from the coasts to the pelagic ocean. We will review recent progress in understanding the key processes taking place in the mixed layer: dynamic processes such as surface waves, Langmuir circulations and turbulence, shear-induced mixing, internal waves, coherent structures, fronts, frontal instabilities, entrainment and detrainment at the mixed layer base, convection, restratification induce physical effects on this important layer. From a biogeochemical perspective, the physical dynamics of the euphotic layer, as well as biogeochemical processes affecting the cycling of carbon, micro- and macronutrients, production and degradation of trace gases as well as microbial dynamics from basic to higher trophic levels affect the layer’s role and sensitivity as part of the earth system. The improvement of the representation of surface mixed layer processes in numerical models is a complex and pressing issue: this session will bring together new advances in the representation of mixed layer processes in high resolution numerical models, as well as evaluation of mixed layer properties in climate models using most recent observational datasets. The coupling of the ocean and atmospheric boundary layers as well as the special processes occurring under sea ice and in the marginal sea ice zone will be given special consideration. This session welcomes all contributions related to the study of the oceanic mixed layer, independent of the time- and space scales considered. This includes small scale process studies, short-term forecasting of the mixed layer characteristics for operational needs, studies on the variability of the mixed layer’s physical and biogeochemical properties from sub-seasonal to multi annual time scales and mixed layer response to external forcing. The use of multiple approaches (coupled numerical modeling, reanalyses, observations, experiments) is encouraged.

Keeping global warming below 2°C will require drastic reductions in emissions together with large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere that must be initiated within this decade to remove hundreds of gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere over the coming decades. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is a promising method to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere whereby well-known chemical reactions, accelerate the ocean uptake of additional CO2 from the atmosphere, imitating geologic weathering processes that have sequestered trillions of tons of atmospheric CO2 in the ocean over millennia.
Compared to other carbon dioxide removal technologies, OAE has noticeable advantages since it is applicable to large regions of the coastal and open ocean and helps to mitigate ocean acidification. However, the effect of introducing gigatons of alkalinity, and potentially silicate, and dissolved metals on marine pelagic ecosystems remains unknown and the direct measurement of CO2 drawdown at scale from OAE is still unclear.
In this session, we welcome research ranging from field and laboratories experiments, theory, comparison with natural analogues and numerical modelling addressing the potential application of OAE and that could shed light on some still open questions: i) which are the ecological risks or co-benefit of OAE (ii) how can desired and undesired effects be identified, monitored, and mitigated; iii) under what conditions does OAE most efficiently sequester atmospheric CO2?

This session is a compilation of two independent sessions: ITS1.7 ‘Sandy solutions for coastal safety, measurements and modelling’ and GM7.3 ‘Arctic coastal processes’.

Future projections show that coastal regions are among the most vulnerable ecosystems on our planet. From nearshore to dunes, the coastal system provides ecosystem services such as water supply and storage, recreation, biodiversity and flood protection, all of which can be considered of critical importance for human well-being. Climate change, sea level rise and anthropogenic impacts can affect these services by altering topography and habitat development. Flexible nature-based solutions have been proposed to promote resilience against climate change and safeguard coastal services for current and future generations. For this session we aim to bring together experts from varying disciplines focused on measuring, modelling and designing nature-based solutions in a changing world. This includes but is not limited to topics related to coastal morphology, sediment and vegetation dynamics, hydrology, and anthropogenic impacts.

Decreasing extent and duration of sea ice cover, changes in storm patterns as well as rising sea surface and air temperatures impact coastal processes in the Arctic. Wave overtopping, flooding and coastal erosion pose risks to societies and infrastructure located at the coast. There is a pressing need to understand the rates and mechanisms of coastal change to better predict future trajectories under the changing climate. In this session, we invite contributions from a range of disciplines and across time scales on local to pan-Arctic studies related to coastal processes in the Arctic. Those can include observational (satellite and instrumental) data, historical data, geological records and proxy data, model simulations as well as forecasts, for the past, present and future rates and drivers of Arctic coastal change. The common denominator of these studies will be their focus on a better understanding of short- to long-term mechanisms and feedbacks that drive Arctic coastal changes, and their impact on coastal communities and infrastructure, at local to global scales.

This session aims to bring together a diverse group of scientists who are interested in how life and the planet have co-evolved over geological time. This includes studies of how paleoenvironments have contributed to biological evolution, and also those which focus on the way in which life has altered or regulated Earth’s biogeochemical cycles and climate. As an inherently multi-disciplinary subject, we welcome submissions that explore any period of Earth history and which present new paleoenvironmental, paleobiological or geochemical data or aim to understand our planet and its biosphere through numerical modelling. Part of this session will specifically explore the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition which saw the appearance and diversificaiton of early animals.

Carbonate (bio)minerals have been essential indicators for life throughout most of Earth’s history and are important archives for past climate and environmental change. Geochemical investigations are crucial for understanding (I) the paleobiology of carbonate biomineralizers, (II) the evolution of microbial habitats, and (III) complementary changes in the atmosphere-hydrosphere systems through time. With this session, we encourage contributions from sedimentology, geochemistry and (geo)biology that utilize carbonate (bio)minerals (e.g., invertebrate shells, foraminifera, microbialites and stromatolites) with the aim to reconstruct paleo-environments, seasonality, seawater chemistry and paleobiology in a wide range of modern to deep time settings, including critical intervals of environmental and climate change. This includes studies targeting original skeletal carbonate preservation and diagenetic alteration and theoretical or experimental studies of trace element partitioning and isotope fractionation in carbonate (bio)minerals.

Today, the Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans and associated ocean gateways capture the complex intermediate and deep-water return pathways of the global thermohaline circulation. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) acts as a low latitude heat source for the polar regions and is a crucial part in globally significant climatic systems like the Australasian Monsoon, Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). This highlights the Indo-Pacific’s importance in deciphering past and future coupled ocean-atmosphere dynamics.
The Cenozoic also sees large reorganisation of the hydrographic and atmospheric fronts across the Southern Hemisphere (SH). These changes have significant consequences for icesheet build-up in Antarctica and ocean-atmosphere carbon cycling, with further implications for surface ocean dynamics and productivity. Characterisation of these fronts using sedimentary records, located in mid-to-high latitudes in the SH allow us to understand the sensitivity and interconnection between Antarctic icesheets and carbon cycle to frontal shifts.
This session explores the role of the Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans and their gateways in global climate change and as a biogeographic diversity hot spot from the geological past to the present. To understand the Cenozoic evolution of these Oceans and associated low- and high-latitude (especially SH) gateways, we invite submissions on wide-ranging topics including paleoclimatology, palaeoceanography, sedimentology, palaeontology, and data-model comparisons. This session will examine how feedbacks between the IPWP, Australasian hydroclimate and tectonic and/or weathering processes affect the evolution of the global monsoons and the ITCZ. We also encourage marine and/or terrestrial multi-proxy studies, investigating Cenozoic teleconnections of both equatorial Indo-Pacific (e.g., ENSO/IOD) and high latitude SH processes (e.g., variability of hydrographic fronts).

Minerals are formed in great diversity under Earth surface conditions, as skeletons, microbialites, speleothems, or authigenic cements, and they preserve a wealth of geochemical, biological, mineralogical, and isotopic information, providing valuable archives of past environmental conditions. Furthermore, minerals form and dissolve during diagenesis, which modifies the properties of carbonate and clastic rocks. Understanding processes of fluid-rock interactions and interpreting mineral archives still requires fundamental research, with implications for the reconstruction of Earth’s geological record, as well as for man-made systems for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), geothermal energy, or critical mineral resources.

In this session we welcome oral and poster presentations from a wide range of research of topics, including process-oriented studies in modern systems, the ancient rock record, experiments, computer simulations, and high-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy techniques. We intend to reach a wide community of researchers sharing the common goal of improving our understanding of the fundamental processes underlying mineral formation, which is essential to read our Earth's geological archive.

Large amounts of methane, one of the most important greenhouse gasses, are produced in marine and lacustrine systems – but the majority is also consumed in sediments and the water column before reaching the atmosphere. Understanding the fate of methane in the aquatic realm is still a major scientific challenge because it is governed by a vast diversity of geological, oceanographic/limnological and biological factors.

In this session we will discuss past, present and future controls on methane dynamics in marine and lacustrine systems. Within this overarching theme we welcome contributions related to the following topics:

- methane formation: from water-rock interactions, to petroleum systems and microbial degradation processes
- methane sources: natural and man-made seepage
- subsurface fluid flow and methane/hydrocarbon transport mechanisms
- gas hydrate and permafrost
- gas/bubble transport: from numerical modelling to (geophysical) imaging
- seasonality, diel variations, and other temporal constrains
- methane sinks: from microbes and biogeochemical pathways to physicochemical processes
- methane-derived carbonates and microbe-mineral interactions
- molecular/micro/macro fossils from paleo systems.
- new methodologies and proxies for the investigation of methane sources and sinks

Fluid flow in the Earth’s crust is driven by pressure gradients and temperature changes induced by internal heat. The expression of crustal fluid flow is associated with a range of structural and geochemical processes taking place in the basement and in sedimentary basins. Groundwater, hydrothermal brines and gases circulating in the subsurface interact with local structures across different tectonic and geological settings. Under near-lithostatic conditions fluids and rocks are expelled vertically to the near-surface featuring a variety of surficial geological phenomena ranging from hydrothermal systems to sedimentary and hybrid volcanism and cold seeps both onshore and offshore. These vertical fluid flow expressions and piercement structures are characterized by complex sedimentary deformation and geochemical reactions where life can adapt to thrive in extremely harsh environments making them ideal windows to the deep biosphere. Several studies have shown that CO2- and CH4-dominated (or hybrid) vents played a key role in the evolution of our planet and the cycles of life during several geological eras. Similar structures on other planets are promising sites for exploration where habitable niches could have been present. Furthermore, the elevated pore pressures often encountered in reservoirs at depth make piercements ideal natural laboratories to capture precursors of seismic events and dynamically triggered geological processes. Yet, the geochemical and geophysical processes associated with the evolution of these vertical fluid flow features and piercements remain poorly understood.
This session welcomes contributions from the community working on magmatic and sedimentary environments and the domains where they interact on Earth and in the Universe using geophysical, geochemical, microbial, geological, remote sensing, numerical and laboratory studies to promote a better understanding of modern and paleo fluid-driven systems in the upper crust. In particular we call for contributions from: 1) investigations of tectonic discontinuities pre-existing geological structures; 2) the geochemical reactions occurring at depth and at the surface including microbiological studies; 3) geophysical imaging and monitoring of fluid flow systems associated with vertical fluid expulsion at the upper crust; 4) experimental and numerical studies about fluid flow evolution; 5) studies of piercement dynamics related to climatic and environmental implications.

Cratons form the stable cores of most continents and preserve an integrated, yet sometimes controversial archive of the evolution of the mantle, crust, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere for the first two billion years of Earth’s history. In this session, we encourage the presentation of new approaches that improve our understanding on the formation, structure, and evolution of cratonic crust and lithosphere with time. In addition, we welcome contributions from studies of supracrustal cratonic records on the evolution and chemistry of the early surface environments and life. This session aims to bring together scientists from a large range of disciplines to provide an interdisciplinary and comprehensive overview of the field. This includes, but is not limited to, fields such as early mantle dynamics, the formation, evolution and destruction of the early crust and lithosphere, the formation of early land and oceans, the interplay between craton formation and plate tectonics, mineral deposits on cratons, early surface environments and the evolution of the early biosphere.

This session is merged from the sessions "Long-Term Flux Observation and Ecosystem Research Networks - Benefits for Science and Society" and "Using Flux Measurement for Immediate Societal Benefits".

The first part of the session provides:

• A discussion platform to exchange the state-of-the-art and novel developments in such long-term research networks
• Helps recognize the multiple values of these networks for science and society
• And motivates interaction between users, networks organizers, and stations

Specific topics are :

1. Characteristics and challenges of long-term measurements in research networks: among others, e.g., adaptation to scientific progress, technology change, and scope changes, harmonization of new and legacy data, development, and implementation of methods and procedures, quality assessment and control, and network representativeness and site-specific attribution of change in ecosystems to drivers, i.e. intrinsic ecosystem dynamics, management, and environmental change.
2. Scientific results specific to the analysis of long-term data: among others, e.g,. temporal scales of change: climate change, trends and variability, role in synthesis studies
3. Synergy from collaboration with other scientific communities (e.g. collocation with other networks, campaign studies, scientific studies)
4. Sustainability and purposes to society – dialogue with stakeholders and users, participation

The second part focuses on using flux measurements for immediate societal benefits:

• Most of the ongoing GHG measurements are used for important discoveries achieved through process-level academic studies, and for long-term climate and ecosystem modeling. Most of the water measurements at the GHG flux sites are used for applications of computing and interpreting ecosystem-level GHG exchange.

• Such measurements use ultra-high-resolution methodology and state-of-the-art hardware vastly superior to typical monitoring-grade methods and equipment deployed outside academia for a wide range of non-academic decision-making applications, from gas leaks to drought or heat wave detections. However, despite providing exceptional ways to measure GHG emissions and ET, direct flux measurements are very rarely utilized outside academia.

This part of the session, organized through research-industry collaborations, presents new ideas and existing examples of how to better utilize direct flux measurements for immediate societal benefits.

The session will explore a wide range of key research (and policy) questions for blue carbon, carbon stored in marine and coastal ecosystems. This will support understanding of adaptation and mitigation processes within marine, small islands, and coastal ecosystems.
Since 196 Parties to the Paris Agreement committed to transforming their development trajectories towards sustainability and called for limiting global warming to well below 2°C – ideally 1.5°C – above pre-industrial levels, to meet these goals, global carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Global averages for carbon pools (soil organic carbon and living biomass) of focal coastal habitats. Carbon is stored in three coastal habitats, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, and mangroves, which are thought to be the largest repositories of carbon in marine and coastal ecosystems. Marine and coastal ecosystems, including small islands that are the interface between the terrestrial and marine ecosystems and are directly affected by climate change for relatively short periods, sequester and store more carbon per unit area than terrestrial forests and are now being recognized for their role in mitigating climate change.

IPCC has admitted Blue Carbon as carbon fluxes and storage in marine and coastal ecosystems. All biologically driven carbon fluxes and storage in marine and coastal ecosystems amenable to management can be considered blue carbon.
Therefore, we see blue carbon as an opportunity to contribute to global carbon reduction and climate change mitigation objectives.

This session invites researchers to work on:
1. Carbon uptake capabilities of marine, small islands, and coastal ecosystems
2. Functions of the marine, small islands, and coastal ecosystems
3. Comparison between coastal and terrestrial ecosystems by remote-sensed and in-situ observational, experimental, conceptual, and modeling approaches
4. Spatial and temporal changes of coastal ecosystems (marine, small islands, and coastal areas) in the past, present, and future

Empowering the natural primary production capacity of the Earth System Carbon Cycle, without the risks of engineering the composition of the environment itself, to remove excess atmospheric CO2, is the subject of this Session. Activities and mechanisms that decrease CO2, without increasing acidification, and which, importantly, allow the economies of the world to continue to grow and prosper are encouraged; particularly global Nature Based Carbon Cycle Management Solutions (NBCCMS) effecting an efficiency gain in the natural capture and storage of carbon, enabling the control and regulation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere via natural mechanisms. NBCCMS should provide no mechanism for a preferential pressure on naturally determined biodiversity.

The Earth has a carbon cycle, where carbohydrate and hydrocarbon structures produce carbon dioxide (CO2), through respiration and combustion just below or at the Earth’s surface. The CO2 released into the atmosphere is then taken up by biological primary production, through photosynthesis, and converted back into carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. Traditionally, forests are known to play a key role in the carbon cycle; from an EU perspective alone, offsetting about 10% of total European GHG emissions, with a net carbon sink of 400 Mt CO2eq/yr (EEA, 2020), mainly in forest lands and to a less extent in Harvested Wood Products (HWPs). More recently, other terrestrial ecosystems and also oceanic ecosystems have been shown to play equally key roles in the Earth’s carbon cycle from a global perspective. Now, to reach global targets for climate neutrality by 2050, further boosting the role of NBCCMS in increasing the permanence of carbon stored in natural ecosystems as well as in harvested products is needed.

We have become so accustomed to being instructed that there is no ‘silver bullet’ to the anthropogenic climate crisis that most of us have begun to accept it as an irrefutable fact. However, there are no published papers demonstrating this, if indeed it is something that could be demonstrated. In a more simple thought process having worked out how to supercharge the combustion side of the Earth’s carbon cycle, during the unprecedented innovation of the industrial revolution, it doesn’t seem too far fetched to imagine that there are NBCCMSs for supercharging the photosynthetic side of this natural cycle and rebalancing the system.

A grand challenge facing society in the coming decades is to feed the growing human population in a sustainable and healthy manner. This challenge is central to many of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals (SDGs), including the zero hunger goal but also those for human health, water, terrestrial biodiversity and sustainable production and consumption.
This problem is made more complex by an increasingly globalised food system and its interactions with a changing climate. Agri-food system actors - including policy makers, corporations, farmers, and consumers - must meet this challenge while considering potentially conflicting priorities, such as environmental sustainability (e.g., minimising disturbance to ecosystems via greenhouse gas emissions and the use of water, land, fertilisers and other inputs), economic viability (e.g., revenues for food producers and guaranteed access for consumers), nutritional balance and quality (e.g., addressing overconsumption and undernourishment), and resilience to climate change.
This growing complexity of agri-food systems, which can involve global supply chains and difficult environmental and societal tradeoffs, needs to be better understood.
The type of product (e.g. plant or meat based, fresh or processed), as well as the location and method of production, can play an important role in improving the nutritional quality and environmental sustainability of global food production, to enable healthy and sustainable diets. Quantifying and assessing these multiple outcomes while accounting for the linkages, interconnections, and scales of local and global supply chains will be essential for informing decisions aimed at developing sustainable and resilient agri-food systems.
This session welcomes submissions that quantify and assess a range of outcomes from agri-food systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales, and the trade-offs or synergies between them. The session will include studies providing improved methods for quantifying multiple environmental, economic or social dimensions, studies that incorporate the role of food trade into solution-development, and studies that seek to achieve multiple sustainability goals together.

Soils represent a major terrestrial store of both organic and inorganic carbon. At present soils are a net carbon sink, and building soil carbon stocks holds significant potential for achieving net zero carbon. Furthermore, the storage, stability, and cycling of carbon is fundamental to the productivity and resilience of soil systems, and preserving and enhancing soil carbon stocks is critical for allowing sustainable agricultural intensification.

Avenues for organic carbon sequestration include plant-based inputs, the addition of pyrogenic carbon (biochar), and addition of composts or other additives such as manures and soil conditioners. Enhanced silicate weathering may hold significant potential for building inorganic carbon stocks, while inputs from bedrock, and mediation by land use changes such as afforestation, may also enhance inorganic soil carbon.

This session seeks to explore how soil carbon stocks can be increased so as to simultaneously enhance agricultural productivity, mitigate negative repercussions of changing environmental conditions and achieve carbon neutrality. Alongside this, advances in methods for monitoring and modelling rates of soil carbon loss or sequestration are key to inform political, agronomical, and geo-engineering approaches. We welcome contributions exploring methods of increasing and monitoring both organic and inorganic carbon stocks, and studies exploring the storage, stability, and cycling of carbon within soil systems. Early career researchers are strongly encouraged to apply, and we seek submissions considering empirical, modelling, or meta-analytical approaches.

The session gathers multi-disciplinary geoscientific aspects such as dynamics, reactions, and environmental/health consequences of radioactive materials that are massively released accidentally (e.g., Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents, wide fires, etc.), future potential risk of leakage (e.g., Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant) and by other human activities (e.g., nuclear tests).

The radioactive materials are known as polluting materials that are hazardous for human society, but are also ideal markers in understanding dynamics and physical/chemical/biological reactions chains in the environment. Therefore, man-made radioactive contamination involves regional and global transport and local reactions of radioactive materials through atmosphere, soil and water system, ocean, and organic and ecosystem, and its relations with human and non-human biota. The topic also involves hazard prediction, risk assessment, nowcast, and countermeasures, , which is now urgent important for the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

By combining long monitoring data (> halftime of Cesium 137 after the Chernobyl Accident in 1986, 12 years after the Fukushima Accident in 2011, and other events), we can improve our knowledgebase on the environmental behavior of radioactive materials and its environmental/biological impact. This should lead to improved monitoring systems in the future including emergency response systems, acute sampling/measurement methodology, and remediation schemes for any future nuclear accidents.

The following specific topics have traditionally been discussed:
(a) Atmospheric Science (emissions, transport, deposition, pollution);
(b) Hydrology (transport in surface and ground water system, soil-water interactions);
(c) Oceanology (transport, bio-system interaction);
(d) Soil System (transport, chemical interaction, transfer to organic system);
(e) Forestry;
(f) Natural Hazards (warning systems, health risk assessments, geophysical variability);
(g) Measurement Techniques (instrumentation, multipoint data measurements);
(h) Ecosystems (migration/decay of radionuclides).

The session consists of updated observations, new theoretical developments including simulations, and improved methods or tools which could improve observation and prediction capabilities during eventual future nuclear emergencies. New evaluations of existing tools, past nuclear contamination events and other data sets also welcome.

Soils play an essential role in supplying numerous ecosystem services such as food regulation, nutrient regulation, erosion regulation, water purification, carbon sequestration, food and fibre provisioning. Therefore, they play an essential role in human wellbeing. The unsustainable use of soil is one of the significant causes of land degradation due to soil erosion, sealing, pollution, salinization and wildfires—this trigger two of the most critical challenges of our time, biodiversity loss and climate change. A global effort is needed to tackle this unprecedented degradation trend caused by human actions, to maintain healthy soil functions and the services provided, especially in a growing consumption and population that are exhausting the ecosystem resources and contributing to climate change. It is paramount to develop creative solutions to make soil management more sustainable and maintain soil health.
In this session, we welcome contributions covering inter and transdisciplinary research through observational, theoretical and applied studies on soil ecosystem services and soil function in the context of a changing global environment. Topics of interest are (although not limited to): 1) Impacts of soil degradation on soil function and ecosystem services such as Climate neutrality and 2) Soil conservation and restoration actions for maintaining ecosystem services (including research, management, education and policy), 3) soil carbon sequestration related to land management practices and 4) integration of digital tools to support soil ecosystem services provisioning.

"This session is supported by the European Commission Horizon Europe project InBestSoil [Grant Agreement 101091099], and by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education Research, and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 22.00466".

Remaining carbon budgets specify the maximum amount of CO2 that may be emitted while stabilizing warming at a particular level (such as the 1.5°C or 2.0°C target), and are thus of high interest to the public and policymakers. Estimates of the remaining carbon budget come with associated uncertainties, which increase in relative terms as more ambitious targets are being considered, or as emission reductions continue to be delayed. As a result, practical implementation of remaining carbon budgets is challenging.

This session aims to further our understanding of the climate response under various emission scenarios that aim to inform the goals of the Paris Agreement, with particular interest in emission pathways entailing net-zero targets. We invite contributions that use a variety of tools, including fully coupled Earth System Models (ESMs), Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), or simple climate model emulators, that advance our knowledge of remaining carbon budgets, net-zero targets, and policy implications.

We welcome studies exploring different aspects of climate change in response to future emission scenarios. In addition to studies exploring carbon budgets and the TCRE framework, we welcome contributions on the zero emissions commitment (ZEC), effects of different forcings and feedbacks (e.g. permafrost carbon feedback) and non-CO2 forcings (e.g. aerosols, and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases), estimates of the remaining carbon budget to keep warming below a given temperature target, the role of pathway dependence and emission rate, the climate-carbon responses to different emission scenarios (e.g. RCP or SSP scenarios, idealized scenarios, or scenarios designed to reach net-zero emission level), and the behaviour of TCRE in response to artificial carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere (i.e. CDR or negative emissions). Contributions from the fields of climate policy and economics focused on applications of carbon budgets and benefits of early mitigation are also encouraged.

In 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate recognized the deteriorating resilience of the Earth system, with planetary-scale human impacts constituting a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Earth system resilience critically depends on the nonlinear interplay of positive and negative feedbacks of biophysical and increasingly also socio-economic processes. These include dynamics and interactions between the carbon cycle, the atmosphere, oceans, large-scale ecosystems, and the cryosphere, as well as the dynamics and perturbations associated with human activities.

With rising anthropogenic pressures, there is an increasing risk we might be hitting the ceiling of some of the self-regulating feedbacks of the Earth System, and cross tipping points which could trigger large-scale and partly irreversible impacts on the environment, and impact the livelihood of millions of people. Potential domino effects or tipping cascades could arise due to the interactions between these tipping elements and lead to a further decline of Earth resilience. At the same time, there is growing evidence supporting the potential of positive (social) tipping points that could propel rapid decarbonization and transformative change towards global sustainability.

In this session we invite contributions on all topics relating to tipping points in the Earth system, positive (social) tipping, as well as their interaction and domino effects. We are particularly interested in various methodological approaches, from Earth system modelling to conceptual modelling and data analysis of nonlinearities, tipping points and abrupt shifts in the Earth system.

Due to the growing pressures on marine resources and the ecosystem services demand, the interest of scientific and politic world is moving to ensure marine ecosystems conservation and environmental sustainable development providing policies to meet the UN 2030 Agenda Goal 14 in order to “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. To act against the decline of ocean health and to create a framework of stakeholders, the UN proposed the establishment of the “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development” able to bring regional knowledge and priorities together in an international action plan. Anthropogenic activities could have an impact on the marine environment and affect the ecosystem equilibrium. The marine environment is a dynamic, sensitive and fragile area in which it is advantageous to apply new methodologies and observing methods to increase the quantity and quality of the data. Since ocean dynamics affect the dispersion of pollutants such as chemicals, plastics, noise and invasive species, the ecosystems status should be analyzed through the study of abiotic variables distribution at a proper spatio-temporal scale. To analyze the ocean environmental quality, a large amount of data obtained by global observation systems (e.g. GOOS, EMODNET) is needed, which requires the development of cost-effective technologies for integrated observing systems and to support the study of, e.g., biological variables. The session focuses on marine ecosystems, technological developments for the study of abiotic and biotic factors, with a focus on anthropogenic impacts. Multidisciplinary approaches using data coming from multiple sources are encouraged. Integration of mathematical models, in-situ and remote observations is suggested with the aim to develop methods, technologies and best practices to maintain, restore and monitor biodiversity and to guarantee sustainable use of marine resources. The following topics will be discussed: effects of pollution on biota considering their natural and anthropogenic sources; global change effects on marine ecosystem; new technology development; advanced methods for collection, data processing, and information extraction; benthic and pelagic community dynamics; economic evaluation of natural capital.

Geoscience expertise is essential for the functioning of modern societies, to address many of the most urgent global problems, inform decision-making, and guide education at all levels, by equipping citizens to discuss, shape and implement solutions to local, regional and global social-environmental problems. In recent years, geoscientists have become more and more aware of ethical responsibilities to put their knowledge at the service of society, foster public trust in geosciences, and reflect on the environmental footprint of research practices. Geoethics aims to provide a common framework for orienting geoscientists’ concerns on delicate issues related geoscience-society interaction and to nourish a discussion on the fundamental principles and values which underpin appropriate behaviors and practices, wherever human activities interact with the Earth system.
The goal of the session is to foster the discussion on the following spectrum of topics:
- philosophical and historical aspects of geoscience, their contemporary relevance and role in informing methods for effective and ethical decision-making;
- geoscience professionalism and deontology, research integrity and issues related to harassment and discrimination, gender and disability in geosciences;
- ethical and social questions related to the management of land, air and water including environmental changes, pollution and their impacts;
- socio-environmentally sustainable supply of georesources (including energy, minerals and water), importance of effective regulation and policy-making, social acceptance, and understanding and promoting best practices;
- questioning professional practices in geosciences and their impact on the environment, and implementation of new practices to reduce it;
- resilience of society related to natural and anthropogenic hazards, risk management and mitigation strategies, including adaptation knowledge and solutions;
- ethical aspects of geoscience education and communication;
- culture and value of geodiversity, geoconservation, geoheritage, geoparks and geotourism;
- role of geosciences in achieving socio-economic development that respects cultures, traditions and local development paths, regardless of countries' wealth, and in promoting peace, responsible and sustainable development and intercultural exchange.
Session sponsored by International Association for Promoting Geoethics (www.geoethics.org).

A very tiny layer holds most of earth’s life in a complex mix of biotic and abiotic factors that interact in a subtle unique and ever changing play. In this scene, remotely-sensed (RS) signals result from the interaction of incoming, reflected and emitted electromagnetic radiation (EM) with atmospheric constituents, vegetation layers, soil surfaces, oceans or water bodies. Vegetation, soil and water bodies are functional interfaces between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. These signals can be measured by optical, thermal and microwave remote sensing including parts of the EM spectrum where fluorescence can be measured.

This session solicits for contributions on strategies, methodologies or approaches leading to the development and assimilation in models, of remote sensing products originating from different EM regions, angular constellations, fluorescence as well as data measured in situ for validation purposes.
We welcome presentations on topics advancing our understanding of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics under climate change such as ecosystem resilience, fire damage, plant drought stress, food production, food security, nature preservation, biodiversity, epidemiology, anthropogenic and biogenic air pollution. Insights on the assimilation of remote sensing and in-situ measurements in bio-geophysical and atmospheric models, as well as RS extraction techniques themselves, are also welcome.

Finally, this session aim, is to bring together scientists developing remote sensing techniques, products and models leading to strategies with a higher bio-geophysical impact on the stability and sustainability of this very thin layer of the earth we live in.

This session explores the potentials and limitations of various remote sensing applications in forestry, with the focus on the identification and integration of different methodologies and techniques from different sensors and in-situ data for providing qualitative and quantities forest information.
In general, remote sensing allows examining and gathering information about an object or a place from a distance, using a wide range of sensors and platforms. A key development in remote sensing has been the increased availability of data with very high temporal, spatial and spectral resolution. In the last decades, several types of remote sensing data, including optical, multispectral, radar, LiDAR from different platforms (i.e. terrestrial, mobile, UAV, aerial and satellite platforms), have been used to detect, classify, evaluate and measure the earth surface, including different vegetation cover and forest structure. For the forest sector, such information allows efficient quantification of the state and monitoring of changes over time and space, in support of sustainable forest management, forest and carbon inventory or for monitoring forest health and their disturbances. Remote sensing data can provide both qualitative and quantitative information about forest ecosystems. In a qualitative analysis, forest cover types and species composition can be classified, whereas the quantitative analysis can measure and estimate different forest structure parameters related to single trees (e.g. DBH, height, basal area, timber volume, etc.) and to the whole stand (e.g. number of trees per unite area, spatial distribution, etc.). However, to meet the various information requirements, different data sources should be adopted according to the application, the level of detail required and the extension of the area under study. The integration of in-situ measurements with satellite/airborne/UAV imagery, Structure from Motion, LiDAR and geo-information systems offers new possibilities, especially for interpretation, mapping and measuring of forest parameters and will be a challenge for future research and application.