Modeling Soil Processes: Review, Key Challenges, and New Perspectives
The complexity of soil and its importance to a wide range of ecosystem services presents major challenges to the modeling of soil processes. Although major progress in soil models has occurred in the last decades, models of soil processes remain disjointed between disciplines, with considerable uncertainty remaining in the quality of predictions and several challenges that remain to be addressed.
A review of soil models with a focus on ecosystem services
In this paper, we review the role of modeling soil processes in quantifying key soil processes that shape ecosystem services, with a focus on provisioning and regulating services. We then identify key challenges in modeling soil processes, including the systematic incorporation of heterogeneity and uncertainty, the integration of data and models, and strategies for effective integration of knowledge on physical, chemical, and biological soil processes. We discuss how the soil modeling community could best interface with modern modeling activities in other disciplines, such as climate, ecology, and plant research, and how to weave novel observation and measurement techniques into soil models.
Towards an international soil modelling consortium
We propose the establishment of an international soil modeling consortium to coherently advance soil modeling activities and foster communication with other earth science disciplines. Such a consortium should promote soil modeling platforms and data repository for model development, calibration and intercomparison essential for addressing contemporary challenges.
Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- Modeling Soil Processes: Review, Key Challenges, and New Perspectives
- Publication date
- 13 May 2016
- Publication type
- Publication
- Magazine
- Vadose Zone Journal 15(5):1-57
- Product number
- 2434