Enhanced Weathering (EW)—the application of crushed silicate rocks to soils and terrestrial waters—has emerged as a promising nature-based solution for atmospheric carbon removal, with estimates suggesting the potential of gigatons of CO₂ removal annually. Yet, significant uncertainties remain around EW, from dissolution kinetics in soils to the transport, transformation, and fate of weathering products in soil and freshwater systems.
This session invites contributions that tackle these uncertainties through theoretical and observational approaches. We particularly encourage cross-disciplinary work that explores not only the carbon removal potential of EW, but also its environmental co-benefits, possible risks, and applications in under-studied regions. By bringing together diverse perspectives, the session seeks to advance a more comprehensive understanding of EW and its role in achieving scalable and safe climate mitigation.

Soil structure and its stability determine key soil physical and chemical functions such as water retention, hydraulic and gaseous transport, macropore flow, mechanical impedance, matter transport, nutrient leaching, redox dynamics, and erosion protection. These soil properties form the basis for biological processes, including root penetration, organic matter turnover, and nutrient cycling. The soil pore network governs soil aeration and hydrology and provides habitat for soil biota, which in turn actively reshape the pore architecture. Soil biota, root growth, land management, and abiotic drivers continuously transform the arrangement of pores, minerals, and organic matter, causing soil properties and functions to evolve across spatial and temporal scales.
In managed agricultural and forestry systems, anthropogenic soil compaction remains one of the major soil degradation processes, with long-lasting impacts on soil structure - particularly in deeper horizons where damage is difficult to detect and slow to recover. Increasing machinery size, traffic intensity, and operation under unfavourable moisture conditions further elevate compaction risks. A particular emphasis is placed on characterizing the mechanical properties of the soil and the processes underlying soil structure formation, stabilization, and degradation. This includes interparticle and organic–mineral interactions, pore-water pressure, and matric potential effects on soil deformation, and biological or mechanical drivers of structural change such as root growth, rhizosphere reinforcement, and bioturbation. Integrative studies that combine hydraulic, biological, and mechanical viewpoints are particularly encouraged.
Understanding the processes and feedback that control soil structure and its functional implications is essential for designing climate smart and resilient management strategies. In this session, we invite contributions on the formation and alteration of soil structure and associated soil functions at all spatial and temporal scales. We encourage contributions that integrate complementary measurement techniques (e.g., geophysics, digital image correlation, rheometry, CT/µCT), bridge different spatial scales, propose solutions to mitigate compaction and enhance soil structural resilience. Special focus lies on:
• feedbacks between soil structure dynamics and soil biology,
• impacts of mechanical stress exerted by heavy machinery under land management operations
• mechanical processes shaping pore architecture.

Science communication includes the efforts of natural, physical and social scientists, communications professionals, and teams that communicate the process and values of science and scientific findings to non-specialist audiences outside of formal educational settings. The goals of science communication can include enhanced dialogue, understanding, awareness, enthusiasm, influencing sustainable behaviour change, improving decision making, and/or community building. Channels to facilitate science communication can include in-person interaction through teaching and outreach programs, and online through social media, mass media, podcasts, video, or other methods. This session invites presentations by individuals and teams on science communication practice, research, and reflection, addressing questions like:

What kind of communication efforts are you engaging in and how are you doing it?
What are the biggest challenges or successes you’ve had in engaging the public with your work?
How are other disciplines (such as social sciences) informing understanding of audiences, strategies, or effects?
How do you spark joy and foster emotional connection through activities?
How do you allow for co-creation of ideas within a community?
How are you assessing and measuring the positive impacts on society of your endeavours?
What are lessons learned from long-term communication efforts?

This session invites you to share your work and join a community of practice to inform and advance the effective communication of earth and space science.

Currently arid to sub-humid regions are home to >40% of the world’s population, and many prehistoric and historic cultures developed in these regions. Due to the high sensitivity of drylands to also small-scale environmental changes and anthropogenic activities, ongoing geomorphological processes under the intensified climatic and human pressure of the Anthropocene, but also the Late Quaternary geomorphological and paleoenvironmental evolution as recorded in sediment archives, are becoming increasingly relevant for geological, geomorphological, paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic and geoarchaeological research. Dryland research is constantly boosted by methodological advances, and especially by emerging linkages with other climatic and geomorphic systems that allow using dryland areas as indicator-regions of global environmental changes.
This session aims to pool contributions dealing with past to recent geomorphological processes and environmental changes spanning the entire Quaternary until today, as well as with all types of sedimentary and morphological archives in dryland areas (dunes, loess, slope deposits, fluvial sediments, alluvial fans, lake and playa sediments, desert pavements, soils, palaeosols etc.) studied on different spatial and temporal scales. Besides case studies on archives and landscapes from individual regions and review studies, cross-disciplinary, methodical and conceptual contributions are especially welcome in this session, e.g., dealing with the special role of aeolian, fluvial, gravitational and biological processes in dryland environments and their preservation in deposits and landforms, the role of such processes for past and present societies, methods to obtain chronological frameworks and process rates, and emerging geo-technologies.

The Critical Zone (CZ), encompassing the Earth's surface from the top of the vegetation canopy to the bottom of the circulating groundwater, is essential for sustaining life and maintaining environmental health. Understanding this region of complex intersections within the natural world and between the environment and society requires a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach that transcends disciplinary and national boundaries, bridging gaps between short-term and long-term environmental processes. This session will highlight experiments, modeling, and the collaborative efforts of CZ research sites and networks from around the world. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Innovative techniques in CZ research and monitoring, such as integrated observation, modeling, and experimental approaches or hybrid methods; Advances in understanding soils, hydrology, and biogeochemical cycling within the CZ; Intersections of society and the CZ; Policy or management implications of CZ research; Development of CZ science networks; and case studies of successful national and international CZ collaborations.

Soil and vadose zone processes, including water, energy, and solute transport, occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, from pores to watersheds. A key challenge in vadose zone hydrology is understanding how small-scale processes control and constrain large-scale system responses. Environmental variability and human activities shape soils’ physical, chemical, mechanical, and hydraulic properties, from saturated wetlands and coastal zones to arid and semi-arid landscapes.
This session focuses on the measurement and modeling of soil properties and processes across landscapes, from the pore scale to the field or watershed scale. Organized in collaboration with the International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC), the session invites contributions that:
• Measure soil physical and chemical properties in the lab, field, or watershed using tools such as micro-scale imaging, in-situ soil sensors, drones, geophysical methods, radars, and remote sensing platforms.
• Model soil processes using analytical, empirical, statistical, or numerical approaches that link processes across scales, including upscaling and downscaling strategies to address heterogeneity in infiltration, evaporation, salinity dynamics, gas transport, and subsurface mass and energy fluxes.
• Investigate spatiotemporal changes in vadose zone properties at different scales through measurement or modeling campaigns, focusing on natural variability or human-driven changes such as climate variability, sea level rise and salinity intrusion, droughts, freeze-thaw cycles, heavy agricultural machinery impacts, and land management practices in forests, agricultural fields, wetlands, coastal zones, grasslands, deserts, urban soils, and mountainous regions.

Lipid biomarkers are widely used to study environmental processes in both modern and ancient (geological) settings. These applications often involve examining the distribution and stable isotopic composition of core lipids—such as n-alkanes, fatty acids, alkenones, sterols, hopanoids, HBIs, HGs, and GDGTs—as well as intact polar lipids. Because the links between biological organic compounds and environmental conditions are complex, it is essential to understand the factors that shape their molecular patterns and isotopic signals across different depositional environments. Key influences include biological sources, physiological changes, transport, post-depositional alterations, and diagenesis.
We welcome studies that advance new biomarkers or methods for applying them to modern environments and the geological past. Such research may focus on tracing carbon dynamics in various systems, reconstructing environmental factors like temperature, rainfall, biogeochemical cycles, human impact, and vegetation variations. Relevant topics include biosynthesis and phylogeny of source organisms, processes of transport and diagenesis, calibrations to environmental parameters, proxy development, and applications for understanding past environmental change.

Human activity became a major player of global climatic and environmental change in the course of the late Quaternary, during the Anthropocene. Consequently, it is crucial to understand these changes through the study of former human-environmental interactions at different spatial and temporal scales. Documenting the diversity of human responses and adaptations to climate, landscapes, ecosystems, natural disasters and the changing natural resources availability in different regions of our planet, provides valuable opportunities to learn from the past. To do so, cross-disciplinary studies in Geoarchaeology offer a chance to better understand the archaeological records and landscapes in context of human culture and the hydroclimate-environment nexus over time. This session seeks related interdisciplinary papers and specific geoarchaeological case-studies that deploy various approaches and tools to address the reconstruction of former human-environmental interactions from the Palaeolithic period through the modern. Topics related to records of the Anthropocene from Earth and archaeological science perspectives are welcome. Furthermore, contributions may include (but are not limited to) insights about how people have coped with environmental disasters or abrupt changes in the past; defining sustainability thresholds for farming or resource exploitation; distinguishing the baseline natural and human contributions to environmental changes. Ultimately, we would like to understand how strategies of human resilience and innovation can inform our modern policies for addressing the challenges of the emerging Anthropocene, a time frame dominated by human modulation of surface geomorphological processes and hydroclimate.

Soils are the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir, and enhancing the long-term persistence of soil organic matter (SOM) is a key strategy for mitigating atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Yet, the mechanisms that govern SOM stabilization—and the interventions that might enhance it—remain among the most complex and debated challenges in soil science.
Recent advances have deepened our understanding of SOM fractionation and protection mechanisms, particularly the role of mineral-associated organic matter (MAOM), particulate organic matter (POM), and occluded POM (oPOM). Insights into the biotic and abiotic pathways leading to MAOM formation have expanded significantly, alongside the development of new-generation soil models that incorporate these processes into SOM turnover estimates.
At the same time, emerging evidence underscores the complex and context-dependent nature of the soil mineral–microbe–vegetation interface. In particular, studies beyond temperate systems reveal that organo-mineral interactions are more dynamic than previously assumed, and that POM can persist for centuries in certain ecosystems or soil horizons. These findings challenge conventional assumptions and highlight the need for tailored management strategies.
This session invites contributions that explore SOM dynamics across scales—from molecular mechanisms and microbial processes to ecosystem-level patterns and global models. We welcome studies that introduce novel insights, challenge established paradigms, or provide robust confirmations of existing theories. Whether your work is based on field observations, laboratory experiments, or computational modeling, we are eager to hear how it advances our understanding of SOM persistence and informs practical applications, from land management to climate policy.
We particularly encourage early career scientists to participate, including those with preliminary findings or innovative conceptual approaches. If your research touches on any aspect of SOM formation, transformation, or stabilization, join us for a lively and interdisciplinary discussion.

Soil health is a pivotal concept for assessing the capacity of soils to sustain ecosystem functions and resilience, deliver ecosystem services, and support climate chance adaptation and contrast, food security and biodiversity.
Major efforts were made to define soil health, identifying indicators, and developing monitoring scheme to support management and policy at various scales. However, significant challenges remain in indicator choice and integration, methodological harmonisation, data interoperability, scalability. Also, effective uptake by practitioners and decision-makers has been scarce. Transdisciplinary indices are required to integrate biological, chemical and physical aspects which can produce both leading, concurrent and lagging indicators. At the one time, these indices should be scaled in space, time and their temporal significance, and their integration compared to broad system indicators such as life cycle assessment indicators at the farm, forest stand, landscape and regional level.
This session brings together contributions that address soil health from complementary perspectives, spanning conceptual frameworks, indicator development, measurement techniques, modelling approaches, data infrastructures, and applications in real-world contexts. By explicitly linking indicator-centred and practice-centred approaches, the session seeks to advance a coherent and operational understanding of soil health that is scientifically robust, comparable across regions and land uses, and usable in monitoring, planning and policy processes.
The session is structured around six interconnected thematic blocks, covering the full pathway from reference frameworks and indicators to harmonised monitoring systems and societal uptake. Particular attention is given to comparability across scales, integration of physical, chemical and biological indicators, emerging measurement technologies, FAIR data principles, and the translation of soil health assessments into actionable knowledge.

Agriculture is the largest consumer of water worldwide and at the same time irrigation is a sector where huge differences between modern technology and traditional practices do exist. Furthermore, reliable and organized data about water withdrawals for agricultural purposes are generally lacking worldwide, thus making irrigation the missing variable to close the water budget over anthropized basins. As a result, building systems for improving water use efficiency in agriculture is not an easy task, even though it is an immediate requirement of human society for sustaining the global food security, rationally managing the resource and reducing causes of poverties, migrations and conflicts among states, which depend on trans-boundary river basins. Climate changes and increasing human pressure together with traditional wasteful irrigation practices are enhancing the conflictual problems in water use also in countries traditionally rich in water. Hence, saving irrigation water improving irrigation efficiency on large areas with modern techniques is an urgent action to do. In fact, it is well known that agriculture uses large volumes of water with low irrigation efficiency, accounting in Europe for around 24% of the total water use, with peak of 80% in the Southern Mediterranean part and may reach the same percentage in Mediterranean non-EU countries (EEA, 2009; Zucaro 2014). North Africa region has the lowest per-capita freshwater resource availability among all Regions of the world (FAO, 2018).
Several studies have recently explored the possibility of monitoring irrigation dynamics and by optimizing irrigation water management to achieve precision farming exploiting remote sensing information combined with ground data and/or water balance modelling.
In this session, we will focus on: the use of remote sensing data to estimate irrigation volumes and timing; management of irrigation using hydrological modeling combined with satellite data; improving irrigation water use efficiency based on remote sensing vegetation indices, hydrological modeling, satellite soil moisture or land surface temperature data; precision farming with high resolution satellite data or drones; farm and irrigation district irrigation management; improving the performance of irrigation schemes; estimates of irrigation water requirements from ground and satellite data; ICT tools for real-time irrigation management with remote sensing and ground data coupled with hydrological modelling.

Sitting under a tree, you feel the spark of an idea, and suddenly everything falls into place. The following days and tests confirm: you have made a magnificent discovery — so the classical story of scientific genius goes…

But science as a human activity is error-prone, and might be more adequately described as "trial and error". Handling mistakes and setbacks is therefore a key skill of scientists. Yet, we publish only those parts of our research that did work. That is also because a study may have better chances to be accepted for scientific publication if it confirms an accepted theory or reaches a positive result (publication bias). Conversely, the cases that fail in their test of a new method or idea often end up in a drawer (which is why publication bias is also sometimes called the "file drawer effect"). This is potentially a waste of time and resources within our community, as other scientists may set about testing the same idea or model setup without being aware of previous failed attempts.

Thus, we want to turn the story around, and ask you to share 1) those ideas that seemed magnificent but turned out not to be, and 2) the errors, bugs, and mistakes in your work that made the scientific road bumpy. In the spirit of open science and in an interdisciplinary setting, we want to bring the BUGS out of the drawers and into the spotlight. What ideas were torn down or did not work, and what concepts survived in the ashes or were robust despite errors?

We explicitly solicit Blunders, Unexpected Glitches, and Surprises (BUGS) from modeling and field or lab experiments and from all disciplines of the Geosciences.

In a friendly atmosphere, we will learn from each other’s mistakes, understand the impact of errors and abandoned paths on our work, give each other ideas for shared problems, and generate new insights for our science or scientific practice.

Here are some ideas for contributions that we would love to see:
- Ideas that sounded good at first, but turned out to not work.
- Results that presented themselves as great in the first place but turned out to be caused by a bug or measurement error.
- Errors and slip-ups that resulted in insights.
- Failed experiments and negative results.
- Obstacles and dead ends you found and would like to warn others about.

For inspiration, see last year's collection of BUGS - ranging from clay bricks to atmospheric temperature extremes - at https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/session/52496.

Sustainable soil and land management represents a critical challenge in the context of climate change, primarily due to the high spatial heterogeneity of landscapes and the complex temporal scales that govern soil functions and ecosystem dynamics. To address these challenges, integrated modelling approaches are essential to bridge scales, disciplines, and data sources, effectively linking mechanistic physical understanding with data-driven insights. Observations serve as the cornerstone of understanding pedo-hydrological processes, and while modern technological advancements provide a wealth of information, integrating these diverse measurement sources into data-driven and physics-informed models remains a significant hurdle in vadose zone hydrology and soil science in general. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning and AI have opened new pathways for modelling complex Earth system processes, offering cutting-edge applications to characterize soil biogeophysical and hydrothermal properties while predicting the transport of water, heat, and solutes. By assimilating data from field sensors to remote sensing platforms into physics-informed models and digital twin frameworks, soil processes can be simulated across multiple spatial scales. This integration enables more accurate and reliable predictions of critical issues such as climate change impacts, contamination, salinization, erosion, agricultural practices, and land-use change. This interdisciplinary approach-coupling models to represent interactions between soil, microbes, plants, and the atmosphere—not only highlights the promise and limits of integrated strategies but also provides a robust foundation for the resilient, sustainable management of soil and water resources across both agroecosystems and natural landscapes.

Direct anthropogenic perturbations of the P cycle, coupled with other human-induced stresses, is one of the biggest threats to global Earth functioning today. Widespread application of P fertilizers has changed the P cycle from relatively closed to a much more “leaky” cycle, with increased P losses to aquatic ecosystems, influencing their trophic state. Meanwhile, forest ecosystems may be losing their ability to recycle P efficiently, due to excessive N input, extensive biomass removal, and climatic stress. Throughout geological history, P availability has regulated biological productivity with impacts on the global carbon cycle. Climate change and its mitigation affect and will further alter global P cycles.

This interdisciplinary session invites contributions to the study of P from all disciplines, and aims to foster collaborations 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 agriculture, forests, soils and groundwater, through lakes, rivers and estuaries, to oceans, marine sediments and geological P deposits. We welcome both empirical studies furthering process-level understanding of P cycling and modeling studies leveraging that knowledge to larger spatial scales.