Hydrology and soil science originated from water-management needs for ancient civilisation and agriculture, but since then have developed into many specialised disciplines. While irrigation and yield management remain prominent research topics, agricultural fields as soil-plant-atmosphere systems are rarely seen as an integrated hydrological system, despite the pressing challenges posed by intensifying climatic extremes, degrading soils and declining water resources.
This session therefore refocuses attention on agricultural fields as coupled soil-plant-atmosphere systems in which hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes interact. Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial to improve process understanding for enhancing agricultural practices and making agricultural landscapes more resilient.
Given the contrasting temporal and spatial legacies of the processes involved, we need to consider agricultural landscapes under change. How can we prospectively manage systems with different process turnover scales? Moreover, which system-stabilising processes exist to make the landscapes more resilient, not only through “isolated” measures such as retention basins or hedges, but by enhancing characteristics and properties across entire fields or landscapes (e.g. improving soil structure to increase infiltration capacities)?

We invite contributions investigating soil-plant-atmosphere interactions, water, carbon and nutrient cycling, crop responses to environmental stress, and other processes shaping agricultural landscapes across temporal and spatial scales.
We particularly encourage contributions addressing how fundamental process understanding can inform agricultural management practices and modelling approaches. It is important to us to strengthen the connection between different scales – for example, linking small-scale and/or short-term observations and large-scale and/or long-term system responses, and translating them into management strategies/practices and applications.

This session aims to foster exchange between fundamental and applied research, and discussion about transforming interdisciplinary collaboration to impactful solution prospects.