Modeling soil genesis at pedon and landscape scales: Achievements and problems

Abstract

Modeling soil evolution is an important step towards understanding the complexity of the soil system and its interaction with the other systems. The major challenge confronted by pedologists until now is the ability to develop models capable of describing the complete complexity of the soil system. This paper presents the state of art overview of such a soil evolution model, SoilGen, its applications and limitations. In addition, the paper gives an overview of how the SoilGen model may be linked to landscape evolution models to model soilscape development. SoilGen is a mechanistic pedogenetic model in which soil forming processes such as clay migration, decalcification, carbon cycling, bioturbation, physical and chemical weathering coupled with water flow are simulated at multi-millennium time scale. The model has been calibrated and undergone extensive field testing, giving reasonable results at both pedon and landscape scales. However discrepancies between observed and simulated soil properties such as base saturation (BS), cation exchange capacity (CEC) and pH have been reported. These have been attributed partly to simplification of soil forming processes particularly in the weathering and chemical systems. There is therefore a need to extend the description of chemical and weathering systems in the SoilGen model. These extensions will not only improve model performance but will also enlarge its application range in simulating the genesis of typical features of more than half of the WRB-Reference Soil Groups. We also note here that although landscape evolution models have been successfully applied to model soil production and distribution, simplified and/or incomplete description of soil forming processes remain major limitations. We therefore add to the voices in scientific literature calling for integration of pedon and landscape scale models. In addition there is critical need for high quality chronosequence, climosequence, and toposequence profile datasets to enhance calibration and validation of soil evolution models.