Soil health is fundamental to crop productivity, ecosystem vitality, water regulation, carbon storage, nutrient supply, and the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems to multiple stressors. Yet soils are increasingly exposed to dynamic pressures associated with climate change, including drought, heatwaves, flooding, rapid rewetting, and shifting seasonal patterns. These stressors can alter soil functioning gradually or abruptly, with consequences for biological activity, plant performance, soil structure, and the capacity of soils to resist and recover from disturbance. Because many of these responses are mediated by soil microorganisms and their interactions with plants and the soil matrix, understanding soil health under climate stress requires linking processes across scales and scientific domains – from microbial habitats to fields and landscapes.
This session aims to bring together research that advances the concept, assessment, and management of soil health in a changing and increasingly dynamic environment. We welcome contributions that address how soil health and soil multifunctionality respond to climatic variability and extremes, and how resilience can be understood, monitored, and sustained across spatial and temporal scales. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of soil biota, especially microorganisms, as drivers and indicators of soil health, as well as on plant-soil-microorganism interactions that shape resistance, recovery, and long-term functionality of soils.
We invite experimental, observational, and modelling studies that contribute to a more integrative understanding of soil health, including the development of indicators, resilience concepts, monitoring approaches, and management strategies. Topics may include soil health under climate extremes, biological indicators of soil functioning, plant-soil-microorganism interactions, recovery after disturbance, scaling from soil microsites to landscapes, and links between soil health, ecosystem services, and sustainable land use. Contributions that connect fundamental mechanisms with applied assessment and land management are especially encouraged.
By connecting perspectives from soil and plant sciences, microbiology and biogeochemistry to landscape-scale processes, this session will provide a platform to discuss how soil health can be defined, measured, and strengthened under the increasing pressures of global change.