,,,- Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Soil System Science, Halle (Saale), Germany (sara.koenig@ufz.de)
Soil functions in agroecosystems such as nutrient cycling, water filtering and storage, productivity, and carbon storage are highly affected by agricultural management as well as climate change. To understand and predict the complex dynamics, mechanistic modelling is a powerful tool. BODIUM is a site-specific systemic soil model, which was developed for exactly this purpose (König et al., 2023). It integrates the main important biological, physical and chemical processes in soil and at the soil-plant interface, including a dynamic soil structure and explicit microbial activity. It allows for simulating different management practices such as crop rotation, cover crops, tillage, organic and inorganic fertilization.
The web application BODIUM4Farmers builds upon this model and provides a user-friendly interface to support effective soil management (https://bodium4farmers.de/). It was developed in co-design with farmers and agricultural advisors and was already tested by several practitioners. Users can simulate the effect of different management and weather scenarios on soil functions at specific locations within Germany, where soil and weather data are directly provided from our databases.
In this contribution, we will introduce BODIUM4Farmers with selected examples and demonstrate the potential for agricultural practice, but also for teaching and scientific purposes. Although the simulation results in the web application are presented in an aggregated way to easily compare different indicators for soil functions, the underlying process-based model produces daily data along the whole soil profile and thus allows for in-depth analysis of the scenarios.
We will further give insights into ongoing development in regard to extending the management measures including intercropping and differentiated soil tillage operations. Within the EU-project DeepHorizon, we are currently also extending BODIUM4Farmers to include databases for soil and weather for whole Europe, increasing the potential of web application even more.
König, S., Weller, U., Betancur-Corredor, B., Lang, B., Reitz, T., Wiesmeier, M., Wollschläger, U., & Vogel, H.-J. (2023). BODIUM—A systemic approach to model the dynamics of soil functions. European Journal of Soil Science, 74(5), e13411. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejss.13411
How to cite: König, S., Rüschhoff, J., Franke, L., Weller, U., Ansorge, J., Gasser, A., Ohmann, L., Wollschläger, U., and Vogel, H.-J.: Modelling soil functions in agroecosystems: the potential of BODIUM4Farmers for science and practice, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-10220, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-10220, 2026.
