Modeling soil processes: key challenges and new perspectives

Abstract

The remarkable complexity of soil and its importance to a wide range of ecosystem services presents 133 major challenges to the modeling of soil processes. Although major progress in soil models has 134 occurred in the last decades, models of soil processes remain disjointed between disciplines or 135 ecosystem services, with considerable uncertainty remaining in the quality of predictions and several 136 challenges that remain yet to be addressed. Firstly, there is a need to improve exchange of knowledge 137 and experience amongst the different disciplines in soil science and to reach out to other Earth science 138 communities. Secondly, the community needs to develop a new generation of soil models based on a 139 systemic approach comprising relevant physical, chemical, and biological processes to address critical 140 knowledge gaps in our understanding of soil processes and their interactions. Overcoming these 141 challenges will facilitate exchanges between soil modeling and climate, plant, and social science 142 modeling communities. It will allow us to contribute to preserve and improve our assessment of 143 ecosystem services and advance our understanding of climate-change feedback mechanisms, amongst 144 others, thereby facilitating and strengthening communication among scientific disciplines and society. 145 In this paper we review the role of modeling soil processes in quantifying key soil processes that shape 146 ecosystem services with focus on provisioning and regulating services. We then identify key 147 challenges in modeling soil processes including the systematic incorporation of heterogeneity and 148 uncertainty, the integration of data and models, and strategies for effective integration of knowledge 149 on physical, chemical and biological soil processes. We discuss how the soil modeling community 150 could best interface with modern modeling activities in other disciplines such as climate, ecology, and 151 plant research and how to weave novel observation and measurement techniques into soil models. We 152 propose to establish an international soil modeling consortium to coherently advance soil modeling 153 activities and foster communication with other Earth science disciplines. Such a consortium should 154 promote soil modeling platforms and data repository for model development, calibration and inter-155 comparison essential for addressing contemporary challenges.

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ORCID for T. Roose: orcid.org/0000-0001-8710-1063

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