Soil management practices strive to balance outcomes across soils, climates, landscapes, or management histories. A management practice can enhance soil health, carbon storage, nutrient retention, or crop productivity in one context, but generate limited, neutral, or even undesirable soil changes in another. Understanding these context dependencies is therefore essential for determining when, where, and why management practices succeed.
This session focuses on the mechanisms, interactions, and boundary conditions that determine desirable soil management outcomes across spatial and temporal scales. We particularly welcome studies examining interactions among beneficial management practices, including cover crops, crop rotations, reduced tillage, residue management, and organic amendments, and their interactions with soil properties, landscape position, weather and climate extremes, and management legacies. We especially encourage multi-factor and mechanistic research addressing synergies and trade-offs among soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, water availability and retention, soil health, greenhouse gas emissions, crop productivity, and ecosystem services.
By bringing together researchers across diverse fields including soil science, biogeochemistry, agronomy, ecology, and environmental sciences, this session aims to identify the drivers of when and where soil management delivers benefits and to support evidence-based, site-tailored strategies for sustainable agriculture.