Soil resources are globally threatened and require our proactive adaptation to ensure sustainable and resilient land and ecosystem management practices. The complexity and variability of soils limit our capabilities to predict soil functionality and challenge the development of adequate soil management and land use strategies. In particular, soils are permanently under pressure and also highly affected by climate change and extreme weather events. It often remains unclear how environmental changes as well as management strategies influence over a broad spectrum of spatio-temporal scales various soil functions such as nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, water quality, biodiversity and agricultural productivity.
The biogeochemical and physical modelling of soils allows unravelling the complex multi-scale dynamic interactions between biotic and abiotic soil components underlying the emergence of soil structure and functions. Soil models also deepen our understanding of soil physical and biogeochemical processes by integrating sparse data that can only be collected at limited spatial and temporal scales. However, models' outputs can only reflect the hypotheses underlying them.
Within the perspective of soil health and resilience, we would like to question and explore in this session the performance of current data-driven, theoretical, and mechanistic modelling approaches in response to extreme weather events in particular. We invite inter- and multi-disciplinary contributions, ranging for instance from models of microbiome interactions in soil pores to the modelling of agroecosystems and land-use types.