Abstract
Abstract. The central importance of soil for the functioning of terrestrial systems is increasingly recognized. Critically relevant for water quality, climate control, nutrient cycling and biodiversity, soil provides more functions than just the basis for agricultural production. Nowadays, soil is increasingly under pressure as a limited resource for the production of food, energy and raw materials. This has led to an increasing demand for concepts assessing soil functions so that they can be adequately considered in decision-making aimed at sustainable soil management. The various soil science disciplines have progressively developed highly sophisticated methods to explore the multitude of physical, chemical and biological processes in soil. It is not obvious, however, how the steadily improving insight into soil processes may contribute to the evaluation of soil functions. Here, we present to a new systemic modeling framework that allows for a consistent coupling between reductionist yet observable indicators for soil functions with detailed process understanding. It is based on the mechanistic relationships between soil functional attributes, each explained by a network of interacting processes as derived from scientific evidence. The non-linear character of these interactions produces stability and resilience of soil with respect to functional characteristics. We anticipate that this new conceptional framework will integrate the various soil science disciplines and help identify important future research questions at the interface between disciplines. It allows the overwhelming complexity of soil systems to be adequately coped with and paves the way for steadily improving our capability to assess soil functions based on scientific understanding.
Highlights
In 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) decreed the International Year of Soils, and the International Union of Soil Science initiated the International Decade of Soils (2015–2024)
We propose a concept for a systemic approach to modeling soil functions and their dynamics
Search being carried out in the soil sciences can substantially contribute to improving the scientific fundament of this approach, which is especially true for the exploration of interacting processes leading to stable configurations of the soil “functional characteristics”
Summary
In 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) decreed the International Year of Soils, and the International Union of Soil Science initiated the International Decade of Soils (2015–2024). This defines a formidable challenge for soil research, calling for a systemic approach connecting the fragmented disciplines within the soil science community Such a systemic approach, providing a clear perspective on how soil functions emerge from small-scale process interactions, is a prerequisite to understanding the basic controls and to developing science-based strategies towards sustainable soil management. This will have an enormous potential for facilitating communication towards stakeholders and policy makers by replacing the cacophony generated by a disciplinarily fragmented research community with harmonized information on the soil system’s behavior. This leads to the proposal of a general framework for modeling soils as complex adaptive systems, thereby integrating the considerable amount of new insights on soil processes generated within the various disciplines of soil science during the last decades
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