Fire is the primary terrestrial ecosystem disturbance globally and a critical Earth system process. Its frequency and intensity are expected to increase across most regions in the future, posing significant challenges for ecosystems, the carbon cycle, and society. Fire research is rapidly expanding across disciplines, underscoring the need to advance our understanding of fire's interactions with climate, the biosphere, and human systems. This session invites contributions investigating the role of fire in the Earth system at any spatiotemporal scale, using statistical (including AI) or process-based models, remote sensing, field and laboratory observations, proxy records, and data-model fusion techniques. We strongly encourage abstracts on fire's interactions with: (1) weather, climate, atmospheric composition, chemistry, and circulation, (2) vegetation composition and structure and biogeochemical cycle, ocean ecosystems; (3) cryosphere elements and processes (such as permafrost, sea ice), and (4) human health, land management, conservation, and livelihoods. Moreover, we welcome submissions that address: (5) spatiotemporal changes in fire (especially extreme fires) in the past, present, and future, 6) fire products and models, and their validation, error/bias assessment and correction, as well as (7) analytical tools designed to enhance situational awareness for fire practitioners and to improve fire early warning systems.

Extreme fire events have become increasingly frequent all over the world, as seen in recent fire seasons in Turkey, Southern Europe, Brazil, Chile, California, South Korea, and Canada. These extremes and megafires have disproportionate impacts on society and all components of the Earth system, yet much remains to be understood about their characteristics, drivers, links to climate change, methods for quantifying their impacts, and effective mitigation and prevention strategies.

A key area is how extreme fires are represented in fire models. Their stochastic behaviour, uncertainties in observations, and the difficulty of capturing local processes within global frameworks make simulating extremes and their impacts a persistent challenge for coupled models. Emerging big data and machine learning approaches show promise in capturing such events but remain limited in their ability to represent feedback to vegetation, soils, and the broader Earth system.

This session also invites case studies of regional extreme wildfire events, their impacts, and experiences with prevention and mitigation strategies from around the world. We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including global, regional, and landscape-scale modelling; statistical and process-based modelling; observational and field studies; and social science research on all time scales. Our goal is to foster knowledge exchange across disciplines and between scientists, decision-makers, and practitioners, to advance our collective ability to understand, model, and respond to the challenges posed by present and future extreme wildfires.

The Paris Agreement on Climate sets the international objective of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to keep climate warming well below two degrees. However, quantifying past and present GHG emissions and sinks and predicting their future remains a substantial challenge. This challenge is primarily due to the high level of uncertainties in observing and modeling these GHG fluxes at regional to global scales, where national-level budgets remain particularly critical, as they provide the basis for assessing progress towards nationally determined contribution (NDCs). Thus, achieving climate and emission reduction targets requires a substantial improvement in our ability to estimate the budgets and trends of these key major greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4 and N2O).

This session aims to bring together studies to help understand and quantify past, present, and future global and regional budgets, trends and variability, as well as drivers of major GHGs and processes controlling their variations. We welcome contributions using a variety of approaches, such as (national) emissions inventories, field and remotely sensed observations, terrestrial and ocean biogeochemical modeling, earth system modeling, and atmospheric inverse modeling. We encourage contributions integrating different datasets and approaches at multiple spatial (regional to global) and temporal scales (from past over the present and to the future) that provide new insights on processes influencing GHG budgets and trends in the past and future.

This session invites contributions on carbon dynamics in forest ecosystems across all management regimes (from conventional to climate-smart and restoration-focused strategies). Emphasis is placed on establishing robust carbon baselines, refining emission factors, and integrating findings into national inventories, certification schemes, and EU-level policy instruments (e.g., LULUCF, carbon farming). Studies addressing spatial and temporal scaling, uncertainty quantification, and decision-support tools are especially welcome.

The global nitrogen cycle is a fundamental component of the Earth system, influencing terrestrial and marine ecosystem productivity, atmospheric chemistry and climate dynamics. Anthropogenic perturbations have profoundly altered this cycle, leading to environmental challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and eutrophication. Despite decades of research, significant uncertainties remain in quantifying the key fluxes and transformations of nitrogen across the terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric domains. Addressing these challenges requires an Earth system perspective that integrates diverse insights into a coherent global framework and ensures robust representation of nitrogen–carbon–climate interactions in Earth System Models (ESMs).
This session invites contributions that advance understanding of the global nitrogen cycle, its regional and global budget closure, its interactions with carbon, water and climate, including studies that:
• Quantify nitrogen fluxes (N₂O, NH₃, NOx, N₂, BNF, lateral N) across atmosphere, vegetation, soil, and aquatic/marine systems.
• Reconcile regional and global nitrogen budgets using observations, inversions, process-based models, and data-driven approaches.
• Evaluate uncertainties, benchmarking strategies, and emergent constraints for nitrogen–carbon and nitrogen–climate interactions in ESMs and Integrated Assessment Models.
• Assess nitrogen’s role in regulating air and freshwater pollution, land carbon sinks, climate feedbacks, and mitigation pathways.
• Provide synthesis-level insights relevant to global assessments (e.g., IPCC).
By emphasizing budget closure, cross-domain integration, and benchmarking frameworks, this session provides a platform for advancing global nitrogen cycle research and strengthening its connections to Earth system modeling and sustainability challenges.

Anthropogenic disturbance of the global nitrogen (N) cycle has more than doubled the amount of reactive N circulating in the terrestrial biosphere alone. Exchange of reactive/non-reactive nitrogen gases between land and atmosphere are strongly affecting Earth’s atmospheric composition, air quality, global warming, climate change and human health. This session seeks to improve our understanding of a) how intensification of reactive N use, land management and climate change affects the pools and fluxes of nitrogen in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, b) and how reactive N enrichment of land and water will affect the future carbon sink of natural ecosystems as well as atmospheric exchanges of reactive (NO, N2O, NH3, HONO, NO2 and non-reactive N (N2) gases with implications for global warming, climate change and air quality. We welcome contributions covering a wide range of experimental and modelling studies, which covers microbes-mediated and physico-chemical transformations and transport of nitrogen across the land-water-air continuum in natural ecosystems from local to regional and global scales. Furthermore, the interactions of nitrogen with other elemental cycles (e.g. phosphorus, carbon) and the impacts of these interactive feedbacks for soil health, biodiversity and water and air quality will be explored in this session. Latest developments in methodological innovations and observational and experimental approaches for unravelling the complexities of nitrogen transformations and transport will also be of interest.

Direct anthropogenic perturbations of the P cycle, coupled with other human-induced stresses, is one of the biggest threats to global Earth functioning today. Widespread application of P fertilizers has changed the P cycle from relatively closed to a much more “leaky” cycle, with increased P losses to aquatic ecosystems, influencing their trophic state. Meanwhile, forest ecosystems may be losing their ability to recycle P efficiently, due to excessive N input, extensive biomass removal, and climatic stress. Throughout geological history, P availability has regulated biological productivity with impacts on the global carbon cycle. Climate change and its mitigation affect and will further alter global P cycles.

This interdisciplinary session invites contributions to the study of P from all disciplines, and aims to foster collaborations between researchers working on different aspects of the P cycle. We target a balanced session giving equal weight across the continuum of environments in the P cycle, from agriculture, forests, soils and groundwater, through lakes, rivers and estuaries, to oceans, marine sediments and geological P deposits. We welcome both empirical studies furthering process-level understanding of P cycling and modeling studies leveraging that knowledge to larger spatial scales.

Reduction-oxidation processes play a major role in the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients within the Earth’s Critical Zone, from soils and sediments to aquifers and aquatic systems. Redox processes, driven by hydrology, microbial activity, and climate, regulate the speciation, mobility, and transformation of macronutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, with consequences for greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Understanding these processes is critical for predicting how soil and sedimentary ecosystems will respond to global change.
In this session, we invite contributions investigating redox processes coupled to carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycling across aquatic and terrestrial continuum landscapes, soils, groundwater, and freshwater systems. We welcome laboratory and field-based studies as well as modeling approaches that explore mechanisms, controls, and impacts of redox transformations. Studies that link microenvironments to bulk ecosystem behavior or couple geochemical reactions with hydrology are of particular interest. We especially encourage integrative approaches that bridge scales and methods to advance mechanistic insight and predictive understanding of ecosystem functioning.

The climate at the Earth’s surface is affected by natural and anthropogenic changes in cloud properties, aerosol emissions, as well as the proposed intervention of Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), which aims to cool the planet by altering the radiation budget. These changes and perturbations alter the energy balance, hydrological cycle, and biogeochemical processes of terrestrial and marine ecosystems through temperature, precipitation, quantity and quality of solar radiation, and nutrient deposition. Ecosystems, in turn, feedback to climate via biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes.

However, major uncertainties remain in understanding how ecosystems respond to changes in clouds, aerosols, and solar radiation, and the resulting climate feedbacks, limiting our ability to project future climate and ecosystems and to inform effective climate policies. SRM, in particular, carries significant risks due to these uncertainties and large knowledge gaps regarding its impacts on biodiversity, agriculture, and ecosystem services.

This session aims to bring together researchers studying the interactions between ecosystems, clouds, aerosols, and solar radiation, using observational, experimental, and modeling approaches. We welcome contributions from studies on terrestrial and marine ecosystems at all scales, including both mechanism investigation and impact assessments. Studies focusing on the potential effects of SRM are especially encouraged.

This session focuses on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at the biosphere-atmosphere interface, encompassing innovative analytical methods, laboratory and field studies, and emission modelling approaches.

We invite contributions on plant and other biogenic VOC emissions sources (e.g., from soil, litter, and freshwater) under environmental changes and welcome contributions on methodological advances in sampling and analysis techniques, and modelling frameworks that bridge experimental observations with atmospheric processes.

Functional diversity—the range and distribution of traits within biological communities—shapes how ecosystems respond to environmental change and regulate carbon, nutrient, and energy flows. This session explores the ecological and evolutionary processes that drive changes in functional diversity, and how these changes in turn affect biogeochemical dynamics across terrestrial and aquatic systems.

We invite contributions that examine functional diversity in motion: from shifts in community composition and trait distributions to adaptation via evolutionary change. We particularly welcome studies that link trait dynamics to biogeochemical consequences, whether through experiments, observational time series, comparative biogeography, or trait-based and eco-evolutionary models. Contributions may address open questions such as: How do ecological and evolutionary processes interact to drive functional change? Can trait distributions predict ecosystem responses to perturbations? How transferable are eco-evolutionary insights across biomes and scales?

By bringing together work across soils, vegetation, freshwater, and marine systems, this session aims to foster a cross-system perspective on the dynamic links between diversity, adaptation, and biogeochemical function.

High-mountain catchments regulate key hydrological and biogeochemical processes, shaping soil development, vegetation dynamics, water chemistry, and air-water exchange. Their high sensitivity to climate change, through glacier retreat, rising temperatures, and shifting precipitation regimes, means that even subtle alterations can cascade downstream, affecting water quality, biogeochemical fluxes, and ecosystem functioning far beyond the headwaters. Yet, despite their relevance, these systems remain poorly understood. Their steep gradients, rapid hydrological responses, and extreme environmental conditions complicate measurements and modeling, while remoteness, short field seasons, high gas-exchange rates, and low solute concentrations further constrain research. Together, these factors leave substantial gaps in our understanding of spatial and temporal dynamics in high-mountain catchment biogeochemistry.
This session aims to advance our understanding of biogeochemical processes in high-mountain catchments by integrating perspectives across the terrestrial-aquatic-atmosphere interface. We welcome contributions bridging hydrology, carbon, nutrients, and other element cycles from the catchment to the reach and plot scale, including the dynamics of dissolved and particulate elemental fluxes in soils, lakes, rivers, as well as studies exploring the impacts of land use and climate change. We particularly encourage submissions that apply novel methods or interdisciplinary approaches, such as remote sensing, autonomous sensor networks, machine learning, mathematical modeling, and innovative field techniques to overcome current spatial and temporal data limitations. By bringing together scientists from diverse disciplines, this session seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration on the biogeochemical processes and emergent ecosystem responses in these vulnerable environments.

Ecological interactions in cities create opportunities to evaluate the characteristics of urban landscape and how it affects human health and well-being. Urban heat island and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) resulting in excess mortality and respiratory diseases are especially of high concern. Moreover, ecology in cities is also concerned with how urban environment changes, both within and outside buildings and how it affects human health. Furthermore, the ecology of cities and urban ecosystems could examine the health issues arising from environmental and social risks related to human behaviour, like as those related with traffic conditions and biomass burning. Increasing built-up areas in urban ecosystems is one of the largest causes for increasing temperature in such areas can give rise to several health implications and affect their wellbeing. This session focuses on i) understanding the links between urban ecology, urban ecosystems and human health ii) examines the health risks occurred due to increasing air pollution in urban ecosystems iii) assesses the health and wellbeing benefits of urban greenspace, vegetated areas and water bodies as a sustainable solution for better city planning and better urban living. This session is interdisciplinary as it focuses on cross-cutting issues of air pollution-climate change and urban ecosystems by exploring its physical, chemical, biological, and socio-economic sides. It also highlights the agendas of some of the selected SDGs like SDG 3, 11, 13, and 15, and promotes sustainability solutions at the global level.

This session addresses the interdisciplinary and challenging issue of extreme variability across scales, from theory to applications. Because this variability is ubiquitous this session focuses on edge-cutting research in various geophysical domains.

Interdisciplinary soil science is essential to address the complex processes that shape soils and their local and global functions. Close collaboration between experimentalists and modellers, and between theory and observation, can address the scientific challenges of our field. In this session, we invite contributions that showcase successful (or unsuccessful) examples of collaboration, present new ideas and project concepts that couple theory and empirical approaches, or discuss general frameworks for working across disciplinary boundaries. This includes the coordination of experiments and model development, parametrization and validation, but also joint efforts to develop new theories and principles based on observations, test hypotheses with mechanistic models, or derive new hypotheses from model outcomes to guide future experiments.
Our goal is to stimulate discussion and share inspiration on how to strengthen and improve collaboration between experimental and theoretical soil scientists, fostering a more integrative approach to advance soil science.

In addition to strong emission reductions, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) strategies are critical to avoid exceeding the temperature limits of the Paris Agreement. At the same time, large-scale CDR deployment might be in conflict with reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), e.g. massive expansion of bioenergy production conflicts with SDG 2 “zero hunger”, and sustainability considerations are increasingly seen as vital for the success of CDR strategies. CDR approaches, including afforestation and reforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), and direct air capture with CCS (DACCS), must scale to remove up to several hundreds of Gt of CO2 in order to reach net-zero as fast as possible. Robust and optimised monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems are essential in order to enable reliable carbon accounting and guarantee the capacity to continuously and consistently detect the early emergence of CDR-related signals and potential side-effects.

In this session, we invite modelling or observation based contributions on the detection of climatic and biogeochemical signals and their attribution to CDR deployment at different timescales. For example, changes in features of variability, such as, long-term trends, seasonal or diurnal cycles of carbon cycle components but also of variables that could reveal CDR-related side effects (e.g. ocean oxygen, nutrient availability, soil moisture, land-surface properties, etc.).

We welcome studies employing marine mesocosm CDR experiments, pilot CDR field sites, or modelling of novel CDR scenarios and CDR practices. We also welcome studies that use observational networks - including innovative use of existing monitoring networks, such as Argo floats, established land and ocean time series or ICOS data, that can provide insights into CDR potential and impacts. Implementation of machine learning algorithms, optimal fingerprinting or innovative time-of-emergence analysis for MRV are particularly encouraged.

The objective of this session is to gather an understanding of emerging monitoring practices with potential to advance the scientific foundations for robust MRV, and to explore opportunities and challenges for responsible, large-scale implementation of CDR.

Wildfires pose a significant and growing threat to both human populations and the environment. Climate change exacerbates this risk by increasing the frequency, duration, and severity of wildfires. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, and shifting weather patterns create conditions more conducive to wildfire spread, expanding the range of vulnerable areas and turning wildfires into a complex global challenge.
The availability of high-resolution, geo-referenced digital data underscores the need for advanced tools to model wildfire dynamics. A critical task is transforming these vast datasets into actionable insights for stakeholders. Recent advancements in computational science, particularly in the development of innovative algorithms, are essential for understanding and addressing wildfire behaviour and vulnerability.

This session aims to bring together experts from geosciences, climatology, forestry and territorial planning to enhance our understanding of these critical fire-related dynamics and to explore innovative strategies for mitigation and resilience. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we seek to advance the science of wildfire prediction, prevention, and post-fire recovery, ultimately contributing to more effective responses to the growing threat posed by wildfires in a changing climate.

We welcome contributions on topics such as:
• Methodologies for recognizing, modelling, and predicting wildfire spatio-temporal patterns.
• Pre- and post-fire assessments, including fire mapping, severity evaluations, and risk management.
• Long-term analysis of wildfire trends in relation to climate change and land use changes.
• Fire spread modelling and studies on fire-weather relationships.
• Post-fire vegetation recovery and phenology.

Join us in advancing the study of wildfires and developing strategies to mitigate their impact.

The session is addressed to experimentalists and modellers working on air-land interactions from local to regional scales. The programme is open to a wide range of new studies in micrometeorology and related atmospheric and remote sensing disciplines. The topics include the development of new devices, measurement techniques, experimental design, data analysis methods, as well as novel findings on surface layer theory and parametrization, including local and non-local processes. The theoretical parts encompass soil-vegetation-atmosphere transport, internal boundary-layer theories and flux footprint analyses. Of special interest are synergistic studies employing experimental data, parametrisations and models. This includes energy and trace gas fluxes (inert and reactive) as well as water, carbon dioxide and other GHG fluxes. Specific focus is given to outstanding problems in land surface boundary layer descriptions such as complex terrain, effects of horizontal heterogeneity on sub-meso-scale transport processes, energy balance closure, stable stratification and night time fluxes, dynamic interactions with atmosphere, plants (in canopy and above canopy) and soils.

Ocean-atmosphere chemical flux exchanges have significant impacts on global biogeochemistry and climate. This session focuses on new research in the following areas: air-sea fluxes of climate-relevant trace gases such as CO2, CH4, N2O and CO; atmospheric deposition of nutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, iron) and its impact on ocean biological systems; the influence of ocean emissions of reactive gases and aerosols (including dimethyl sulfide (DMS), marine organic compounds and halogenated species) on atmospheric chemistry and climate; and biogeochemistry-climate feedback loops in the ocean-atmosphere system. We also welcome studies on how these fluxes may change in response to anthropogenic and climate stressors. The session has long-standing links to the Surface Ocean ̶ Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS) and the GESAMP Working Group 38 on atmospheric input of chemicals to the Ocean. Submissions are encouraged from all areas covered by these programs, using a range of analysis approaches including field measurements, remote sensing, laboratory studies, and atmospheric and oceanic numerical models.

This year we particularly welcome studies on the impact of extreme events on air-sea gas exchange of climate-relevant compounds in marine systems. Here we invite contributions addressing physical drivers such as marine heatwaves, storms and tropical cyclones, circulation anomalies or sea ice changes; biogeochemical drivers such as hypoxic or anoxic conditions and acidification pulses; biological drivers such as harmful algal blooms; or compound events. Relevant studies may address impacts in all oceanic domains; e.g., open ocean, shelf waters and shallow (< 20 m depth) coastal ecosystems.

The interactions between aerosols, climate, weather, and society are among the large uncertainties of current atmospheric research. Mineral dust is an important natural source of aerosol with significant implications on radiation, cloud microphysics, atmospheric chemistry, and the carbon cycle via the fertilization of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Dust impacts snow and ice albedo and can accelerate glacier melt. In addition, properties of dust deposited in sediments and ice cores are important (paleo-)climate indicators.

This interdivisional session -- building bridges between the EGU divisions AS, CL, CR, SSP, BG and GM -- had its first edition in 2004 and it is open to contributions dealing with:

(1) measurements and theoretical concepts of all aspects of the dust cycle (emission, transport, deposition, size distribution, particle characteristics),
(2) numerical simulations of dust on global, regional, and local scales,
(3) meteorological conditions for dust storms,
(4) interactions of dust with clouds and radiation,
(5) influence of dust on atmospheric chemistry,
(6) fertilization of ecosystems through dust deposition,
(7) interactions with the biosphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere,
(8) any study using dust as a (paleo-)climate indicator, including sediment archives in loess, ice cores, lake sediments, ocean sediments and dunes,
(9) impacts of dust on climate and climate change, and associated feedbacks and uncertainties,
(10) implications of dust for health, transport, energy systems, agriculture, infrastructure, etc., and early warning systems

We especially encourage the submission of papers that integrate different disciplines and/or address the modelling of past, present, and future climates.

Are you unsure about how to bring order in the extensive program of the General Assembly? Are you wondering how to tackle this week of science? Are you curious about what EGU and the General Assembly have to offer? Then this is the short course for you!

During this course, we will provide you with tips and tricks on how to handle this large conference and how to make the most out of your week at this year's General Assembly. We'll explain the EGU structure, the difference between EGU and the General Assembly, we will dive into the program groups and we will introduce some key persons that help the Union function.

This is a useful short course for first-time attendees, those who have previously only joined us online, and those who haven’t been to Vienna for a while!

This session is open to all contributions in biogeochemistry and ecology where stable isotope techniques are used as analytical tools, with foci both on stable isotopes of light elements (C, H, O, N, S, …) and new systems (clumped and metal isotopes). We welcome studies from both terrestrial and marine, aquatic and sedimentary environments as well as methodological, experimental and theoretical studies that introduce new approaches or techniques (including natural abundance work, labeling studies, modeling).
 Results from the successful EGU session that took place earlier have been published in several special issues of Organic Geochemistry and Isotopes in Environmental & Health Studies.

We welcome contributions involving the use of stable isotopes of light elements (C, H, O, N, S) or novel tracers (such as COS) in field and laboratory experiments, the latest instrument developments, as well as theoretical and modelling activities, which advance our understanding of biogeochemical and atmospheric processes. We are particularly interested in the latest findings and insights from research involving:

- Isotopologues of carbon dioxide (CO2), water (H2O), methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO), oxygen (O2), carbonyl sulfide (COS), and nitrous oxide (N2O)
- Novel tracers and biological analogues
- Polyisotopocules including "clumped isotopes"
- Non-mass-dependent isotopic fractionation and related isotope anomalies
- Intramolecular stable isotope distributions ("isotopomer abundances")
- Quantification of isotope effects
- Analytical, methodological, and modelling developments
- Flux measurements

This session aims to unite scientists employing stable isotope analyses of light elements (e.g., carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen) to address ecophysiological questions concerning climate change and other abiotic and biotic stressors.
We invite researchers studying a variety of compounds (e.g., lipids, cellulose, lignin, non-structural carbohydrates, water) from both aquatic/marine (e.g., fish, micro and macroalgae) and terrestrial (e.g., mosses, grasses, crops, trees) ecosystems. Contributions that explore any spatiotemporal scale and use archival materials (e.g., herbarium samples, peat, sediments, loess, tree rings) are particularly welcome.
Researchers utilizing a range of analytical techniques (e.g. IRMS, NMR, Orbitrap and spectroscopy-based methods), as well as different isotope techniques (e.g. natural abundance work, labelling studies, modeling) are encouraged to present their methodological advancements.
By showcasing cutting-edge research and methodological innovations, we aim to highlight the crucial role of stable isotope analysis in ecophysiological studies and foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
We look forward to your contributions to this exciting and dynamic session.

A robust representation of terrestrial carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles requires a fundamental understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions, particularly in the context of a rapidly changing climate. However, a significant challenge arises from the mismatch that occurs when carbon, water, or nitrogen fluxes are measured or modelled at different spatio-temporal scales. Multiple processes determine how mass and energy exchanges scale from the leaf, to the whole plant, to the ecosystem, and eventually to the globe. Despite the evolution of Earth system models to incorporate increasingly complex processes across these scales, uncertainties persist due to these mismatches. The unprecedented rate of climate change, along with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, further complicates our ability to robustly formulate mechanistic underpinnings of biogeochemical processes across scales.
The increasing volume of data at multiple scales—from leaf-level measurements (e.g., gas exchange), tree-level measurements (e.g., sap flow and dendroecology), ecosystem-level measurements (e.g., eddy covariance towers, UAVs, aircraft), to Earth observation from space—presents new opportunities to address these challenges. This session invites studies that improve our overall understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions by addressing the mismatches across different temporal and spatial scales and integrating these insights into modeling strategies. We particularly encourage contributions that explore the effects of climate extremes (e.g., drought, heatwaves, excess rainfall, winter warming) on carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes. In addition to empirical multi-scale observations, we welcome research that delves into data-driven diagnostics and constraints for model evaluation, data-driven parameterisations in mechanistic models, and the development of data-driven/hybrid modelling strategies (i.e., seamless fusion of data-driven approaches and mechanistic models) for an integrated understanding of carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes across scales.

Accelerating global environmental and socio-ecological trends underpin the paramount role of global research collaborations. In addition to increasing organisational constraints, funding mechanisms, strategic intent and governance for environmental research and observation are still largely organised on a national and regional basis. As a consequence, relevant research and infrastructure programmes lack formal coordination across countries and continents in terms of subject matter and timing, which would be essential for well-coordinated project proposals and resulting scientific and strategic cooperation. This situation sub-optimises efforts towards data interoperability and, ultimately, the concerted development and sustainable operation of cross-agency services. Initiatives such as the G8 Group of Senior Officials’ (GSO) Recommendations for Global Research Infrastructures (GRI) are voluntary and have not led to a structural improvement of the situation. Nonetheless, collaborative activities undertaken among Environmental Research Infrastructures (ENVRIs), have become a key instrument in environmental science and science-driven environmental politics. Contributions to this session should present successful examples, experienced constraints and derived recommendations for action. They might address the value chain from open standardised observations and experimental data via scientific analysis towards societal impact through actionable knowledge, but also refer to basic ENVRI activities like access to long-term operated in-situ facilities. An Impact Lecture will introduce the Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructures Initiative, in which SAEON/South Africa, TERN/Australia, CERN/China, NEON/USA, ICOS/Europe and eLTER/Europe will present their work on harmonised data systems, collaboration in the use case 'ecological drought' and with a special focus on training experiences and needs of Early Career Researchers and their roles in existing and emerging Research Infrastructures.

Forests play a central role in the global carbon cycle, biodiversity conservation, and climate regulation, yet their monitoring remains challenging due to spatial heterogeneity and the need for continuous, high-resolution data. While satellite-based observations provide global coverage and long-term continuity, they are constrained by spatial resolution, limited revisit frequency, cloud cover, and difficulties in resolving understory processes or fine-scale structural and physiological dynamics. As a result, satellites alone cannot capture the short-term variability or small-scale heterogeneity that govern many ecological processes.
Internet of Things (IoT) based sensor networks and UAV-based approaches address this gap by delivering spatially detailed, flexible, and high-frequency measurements that bridge the scale mismatch between in situ observations and satellite data, while also enhancing the calibration and validation of satellite products.
At the tree scale, IoT-based devices allow the near-continuous acquisition of ecophysiological variables such as stem growth and sap flow, or microclimatic conditions, as well as canopy spectral properties. IoT sensor networks facilitate the study of tree-to-tree variability in functional traits and their differential responses to climate change drivers. The development of custom-built, low-cost sensors based on open hardware and accessible electronics provides an additional pathway to intensify spatial sampling density while maintaining cost efficiency.
UAV platforms equipped with multispectral and hyperspectral sensors enable canopy-level spectral measurements, which can be processed to detect physiological stress, assess forest health, and generate biodiversity distribution maps. In parallel, UAV-borne LiDAR systems support the derivation of biomass and carbon stocks temporal change estimates, and fine-scale mapping of disturbance events (e.g., pest outbreaks, windthrow, or fire scars).
The session will present recent technological and methodological developments, case studies, and applications demonstrating how, IoT networks, low-cost electronics and UAV sensing can be embedded into ecological monitoring frameworks to improve forest observation capacity across spatial and temporal scales. Finally, research gaps and technical challenges related to integration of UAV and IoT technologies for forest monitoring will be uncovered.

Lipid biomarkers are widely used to study environmental processes in both modern and ancient (geological) settings. These applications often involve examining the distribution and stable isotopic composition of core lipids—such as n-alkanes, fatty acids, alkenones, sterols, hopanoids, HBIs, HGs, and GDGTs—as well as intact polar lipids. Because the links between biological organic compounds and environmental conditions are complex, it is essential to understand the factors that shape their molecular patterns and isotopic signals across different depositional environments. Key influences include biological sources, physiological changes, transport, post-depositional alterations, and diagenesis.
We welcome studies that advance new biomarkers or methods for applying them to modern environments and the geological past. Such research may focus on tracing carbon dynamics in various systems, reconstructing environmental factors like temperature, rainfall, biogeochemical cycles, human impact, and vegetation variations. Relevant topics include biosynthesis and phylogeny of source organisms, processes of transport and diagenesis, calibrations to environmental parameters, proxy development, and applications for understanding past environmental change.

Lipid biomarkers, molecular fossils preserved in diverse environmental archives, provide powerful insights into the interplay between the biosphere, climate, and Earth's surface processes. However, disentangling the complex factors controlling their production, transport, and preservation remains a fundamental challenge for interpreting the environmental signals they encode. This session aims to bridge the gap between modern process studies and paleoenvironmental applications.
We invite contributions employing cutting-edge techniques such as Compound Specific Radiocarbon Analyses (CSRA), Compound Specific Isotope Analyses (i.e, δ²H, δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N), and others to trace their synthesis, biogeochemical cycling, and ecological relationships. We particularly welcome contributions that use lipid records to reconstruct past climate and environmental changes while considering variations in biomarker fluxes and transport mechanisms. We also invite submissions that integrate lipid data with numerical models to quantify fluxes, assess environmental controls, or project future biogeochemical and climate changes.
The session aims to encompass the latest advances of lipid biomarker research across a broad range of environmental archives (terrestrial soils, marine and lake sediments, ice cores, and aerosols) from contemporary to past Earth system dynamics. By bringing together scientists focused on refining our knowledge of lipid sources and sinks, we aim to broaden our understanding of past changes and future ecosystem responses.

The quadrupole mass spectrometer, originally developed as a mass filter in the 1950s, has since evolved into an adaptable tool across research and industry. Its unique ability to monitor gaseous compounds over an exceptionally wide concentration range—from ppb to percent levels (to 100%)—sets it apart from gas-specific sensors, enabling comprehensive, real-time analysis of complex gas mixtures. Modern quadrupoles offer improved response times and detection limits, making in-situ measurements feasible even in dynamic experimental environments.
In this session, we present work that highlights the expanding applications of quadrupole mass spectrometry. Our focus will be on advancements in stable isotope analysis, as well as innovative uses of the technology for analyzing both gaseous and aqueous components. Through these examples, we aim to demonstrate the machine’s growing versatility and its potential to address diverse scientific challenges.
The research presented will underscore the ongoing evolution of quadrupole mass spectrometry as a key analytical technique, opening new avenues for research and industrial applications.

Soils sustain complex patterns of life and act as biogeochemical reactors that produce and consume large quantity of gases, including greenhouse gases, biogenic volatile organic compounds, nitrous acid etc. Interactions with primary producer activity add further complexity to the ongoing gas exchange between soils, ecosystems and the atmosphere. Measurements of gas exchange are not only relevant for deriving emission factors for GHG accounting, for example for agricultural systems, which are central for climate mitigation actions. Such measurements are also important for understanding the underlying processes and their drivers. New technologies including automated chamber systems are developing fast and produce large, high-frequency datasets consisting of thousands of flux measurements of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. They enable new insights into key biogeochemical cycles and their temporal and spatial regulation. However, the increased amount of data also creates a need for new methodologies for raw data processing, data curation, and data analysis to harness the complexity in these data sets. We are looking for abstracts on innovative analyses of the drivers of the gases production/consumption and transport in the ecosystems including field and laboratory studies utilising automated systems for measuring surface-atmosphere GHG exchange, novel processing and analytical approaches and modelling studies based on automated chamber data

This session is dedicated to exploring environmental DNA (eDNA) as a tracer of transport processes, whether hydrological, geophysical, or ecological across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Our primary focus is on genetic signals in freshwater — particularly riverine—but we also welcome contributions that link present-day eDNA patterns to longer-term records preserved in sediments. Beyond rivers, we are interested in studies from wetlands, groundwater, as well as, lakes, coastal waters, and oceans.
Presentations in this session will address the methodologies, applications, and implications of eDNA for understanding the movement, persistence, and transformation of biological material within hydrological and geophysical systems. We encourage contributions that investigate how eDNA distribution is shaped by transport mechanisms, degradation, and environmental drivers such as flow, sediment dynamics, and biogeochemical conditions and what that knowledge can reveal about the physical processes. Studies that integrate laboratory analyses, modeling, or sediment archives to connect scales and processes are particularly welcome.
We also seek contributions that push the boundaries of how eDNA is collected and mobilized. This includes innovative sampling strategies such as custom-built sensors and samplers, automated or distributed collection networks, and citizen science approaches that expand spatial and temporal coverage through crowd sampling.
By bringing together researchers working on diverse systems and approaches, this session aims to advance our understanding of eDNA as both a biological tracer and ecological record, fostering new interdisciplinary collaborations between physical and biological earth sciences.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is the key water flux at the interface of soil, vegetation and atmosphere. Methods to derive this flux or its individual components from in-situ measurements have been developed in various research disciplines, covering different scales from e.g. point scale sap flow or soil heat pulse measurements, via pedon-scale of lysimeters, ecosystem scale of eddy covariance footprints to the landscape scale via drones or scintillometers. In-situ-measurements are necessary for calibration, validation and comparisons with larger scale estimates from remote sensing and modelling, but scaling procedures and uncertainty estimations are required for meaningful comparisons. Additionally, the support of these processes by AI methods holds much promise, but usually depends on large well-described data sets.

This session will mainly focus on the variety of in-situ ET estimates such as from sap flow or soil heat pulse sensors, lysimeters, eddy covariance stations, scintillometers and other (possibly new) methods. We would also like to address the challenges in comparing the different in-situ estimates while dealing with scale-dependency, uncertainty and representativity. We welcome contributions that (1) assess and compare established and new in-situ measurements, (2) address error sources and uncertainty considerations of the respective methods, (3) bridge scales between different in-situ measurements and modelled and remotely sensed ET, (4) evaluate challenges and opportunities of using AI for in-situ scaling and comparisons.

Human activities are altering a range of environmental conditions, including atmospheric CO2 concentration, climate, and nutrient inputs. Understanding and predicting their combined impacts on biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem structure and functioning is a major challenge. Divergent future projections of terrestrial ecosystem models reveal uncertainties about fundamental processes and missing observational constraints. Models are routinely tested and calibrated against data from ecosystem flux measurements, remote sensing, atmospheric inversions and ecosystem inventories. However, it remains challenging to use available observations to constrain process representations and parameterizations in models simulating the response of ecophysiological, biogeochemical, and hydrological processes to future environmental changes.

This session focuses on the influence of CO2, temperature, water stress, and nutrients on ecosystem functioning and structure. A focus is set on learning from manipulative experiments and novel uses of continuous ecosystem monitoring and Earth observation data for informing theory and ecosystem models. Contributions may cover a range of scales and scopes, including plant ecophysiology, soil organic matter and nutrient dynamics, ecosystem microbial activity, nutrient cycling or plant-soil interactions.

Gross photosynthetic CO2 uptake is the largest component of the global carbon cycle and a crucial variable for monitoring and understanding global biogeochemical cycles and fundamental ecosystem services. Nowadays routine measurements of the net biosphere-atmosphere CO2 exchange are conducted at the ecosystem scale in a large variety of ecosystem types across the globe. Gross photosynthetic and ecosystem respiratory fluxes are then typically inferred from the net CO2 exchange and used for benchmarking of terrestrial biosphere models or as backbones for upscaling exercises. Uncertainty in the responses of photosynthesis and respiration to the climate and environmental conditions is a major source of uncertainty in predictions of ecosystem-atmosphere feedbacks under climate change. On the other hand, transpiration estimates both at ecosystem to global scales are highly uncertain with estimates ranging from 20 to 90 % of total evapotranspiration. The most important bottleneck to narrow down the uncertainty in transpiration estimates is the fact that direct measurements of transpiration are uncertain and techniques like eddy covariance measure only the total evapotranspiration. During the last decade, technological developments in field spectroscopy, including remote and proximal sensing of sun-induced fluorescence, as well as in isotope flux measurements and quantum cascade lasers have enabled alternative approaches for constraining ecosystem-scale photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. On the other hand, a variety of approaches have been developed to directly assess the gross fluxes of CO2 and transpiration by using both process based and empirical models, and machine learning techniques.
In this session, we aim at reviewing recent progress made with novel approaches of constraining ecosystem gross primary productivity, respiration and transpiration and at discussing their weaknesses and future steps required to reduce the uncertainty of present-day estimates. To this end, we are seeking contributions that use emerging constrains to improve the ability to quantify respiration and photosynthesis processes, transpiration and water use efficiency, from leaf to ecosystem and global scales.

Plant traits extend the range of earth observations to the level of individual organisms, providing a link to ecosystem function and modelling in the context of rapid global changes. However, overcoming the differences in temporal and spatial scales between plant trait data and biogeochemical cycles remains challenging.

This session will address the role of plant traits, biodiversity, acclimation, and adaptation in the biogeochemical cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. We welcome conceptual, observational, experimental and modelling approaches and studies from the local to the global scale, including in-situ or remote sensing observations.

The terrestrial vegetation carbon balance is controlled not just by photosynthesis, but by respiration, carbon allocation, turnover (comprising litterfall, background mortality and disturbances) and wider vegetation dynamics. Recently observed changes in vegetation structure and functioning are the result of these processes and their interactions with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nutrient availability, climate, and human activities. Their quantification and assessment has proven extremely challenging because of a lack of observations at the spatio-temporal scales needed for evaluating trends and projecting them into the future.

This limited observational base gives rise to high uncertainty regarding the future terrestrial carbon sink. Many questions need answer to determine if this negative feedback to climate change will be sustained under future environmental changes, or whether increases in autotrophic respiration or carbon turnover might counteract it, for example through accelerated tree mortality or more frequent and more severe disturbance events (e.g. drought, fire, insect outbreaks) Shifts in the dynamics of plant mortality, establishment, and growth are expected to significantly influence forest composition.

Uncertainties and/or data gaps in large-scale empirical products of vegetation dynamics, carbon fluxes and stocks may be overcome by extensive collections of field data and new satellite retrievals of forest biomass and other vegetation properties. Such novel datasets may be used to evaluate, develop and parametrize global vegetation models and hence to constrain present and future simulations of vegetation dynamics. Where no observations exist, exploratory modelling can investigate realistic responses and identify priorities for field and experimental campaigns. We welcome contributions that make use of observational approaches, vegetation models, or model-data integration techniques to advance understanding of the effects of environmental change on vegetation dynamics, tree mortality as well as carbon stocks and fluxes at local, regional or global scales and/or over long periods.

Ecosystem models remain limited by how they represent key ecosystem processes and their responses to climate change and extremes. Challenges include capturing vegetation demography and trait diversity, acclimation and adaptation, stress responses and disturbances, carbon allocation within plants and ecosystems, and coupled biogeochemical cycles. Biases related to uncertainties in process representation limit our ability to predict ecosystem dynamics, feedbacks, and atmospheric impacts under global change. This session aims to bring together scientists actively engaged in land ecosystem modelling and model development to share recent advancements in process representations and model evaluation.
We invite abstracts that address one of the following themes:
(1) Advances in representing responses of land ecosystem processes to climate variability, extremes or disturbances;
(2) Advances in accounting for species interactions, trait acclimation and adaptation, and vegetation demography and dynamics;
(3) Methods for improving the representation of biogeochemical processes and interactions in different ecosystems;
(4) site, regional and global studies taking advantage of in-situ measurements, Earth observing systems or laboratory experiments, improving ecosystem model processes.

Session Format
The session will include oral presentations and poster sessions to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration among participants.
We, as conveners, are a diverse group of scientists from five different universities who work with various ecosystem models. We hope to use this session to discuss model improvements and share knowledge between different models.

The land surface plays a critical role in the global cycles of energy, water, carbon and other elements essential for life. The models used for both weather forecasting and climate prediction include land-surface schemes. Land-surface models (LSMs) have evolved to incorporate many individual processes, and most LSMs now incorporate demographic elements derived from the parallel development of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). However, the diversity and complexity of global ecosystems means that current LSMs require many hundreds of parameters whose values are mostly poorly constrained and are difficult to calibrate by any practical method. This problem has slowed the advancement of LSMs such that they are neither improving in their fidelity to observations, nor converging in their future predictions. New approaches to reducing the complexity, including the adoption of eco-evolutionary optimality theories as a basis for process understanding, are being explored but there is still a long way to go to develop more robust, parameter sparse LSMs. In this session, we invite contributions that address the problems of parameterisation, explore new approaches to develop simpler model frameworks, provide insights into how the ever increasingly wealth of data can be used for testing individual processes, or showcase applications of new theoretical approaches in an LSM context.

Human activities on land (LULCC) shape climate by altering land-atmosphere fluxes of carbon, water, energy, and momentum. An increasing focus on land-based climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to meet more stringent targets has expanded the range of land management practices considered specifically for their potential to alter terrestrial carbon cycling or mediate favorable environmental conditions. This focus has also called attention to potential tradeoffs between climate-centric aspects of LULCC and its influences on biodiversity, hydrology and other environmental factors. Advancements in modeling and measurement techniques are opening new possibilities to better describe LULCC and its effects on the Earth system at multiple temporal and spatial scales. This session welcomes all contributions aimed at furthering our understanding of LULCC in the Earth system, including those addressing LULCC effects on carbon, climate, hydrology, and/or biodiversity, and aims to present studies that can inform adoption of appropriate land-based strategies for climate mitigation, adaptation, and ecosystem restoration.

The interactions between soil, plants, the atmosphere, and human activities are of greatest importance for the sustainable management and conservation of ecosystem functions and services. Terrestrial ecosystems are increasingly threatened by global climate change and human activities, which have complex and multifaceted impacts. To predict future changes and develop strategies for sustainable management, it is necessary to understand the impacts and processes involved. A key challenge in ecosystem research is to capture the complexity of these interactions. Simplified experimental approaches and long-term observations often focus on a limited number of variables. This makes it difficult to evaluate the system as a whole. To address this complexity, a variety of advanced experimental and observational platforms is available. These include lysimeters, ecotrons, remote and in-situ sensing technologies, and data-driven and model-based approaches. This session focuses on how ecosystems respond to climate change and other anthropogenic influences. It aims to promote studies that involve lysimeters and ecotrons but is not limited to these methods. We welcome contributions that integrate different approaches to the study of ecosystem processes are very welcome, as long as they are related to climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Topics covered include, but are not limited to:
• Research on the functioning of ecosystems and ecosystem services
• Studies on water and nutrient transport processes and greenhouse gas fluxes within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum
• Approaches to integrating observations across different scales, from small experimental setups to larger landscape or regional studies
• Comparative studies on different measurement and modelling approaches for assessing ecosystem processes
• Investigations of the interactions between climate change, human activities, and ecosystem dynamics

Several areas in the Tropical region - including the Amazon, central America, central and western Africa, and Indonesia - have been identified as climate change hotspots under different warming scenarios in the 21st century. These vast areas harbor a mosaic of vegetation types, ranging from rainforests to seasonally dry tropical forests to agriculture and pasturelands, at multiple spatial scales. Forested areas, rich in biodiversity and high in carbon stocks, have been subject to rapid transformation driven by increasing anthropogenic pressures, climate change, and land use change. Agricultural and agropastoral systems are also under threat posed by changes in the climate system. Atmosphere-land surface interactions, vegetation resilience thresholds, and ecosystem services are being reshaped by rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and more frequent extreme events related to climate change. At the same time, land cover changes - deforestation, degradation, fires, conversion and restoration - have the potential to amplify the impact of these disturbances on these diverse tropical biogeophysical systems.
We thus invite contributions that explore how land use and land cover change (LULCC), under current warming and climate change, are impacting tropical ecosystem functioning. Emphasis is on impacts to water, carbon, and energy stocks and fluxes. We welcome research using remote sensing (e.g., MODIS, ECOSTRESS, SMAP, GEDI, Sentinel, SWOT, BIOMASS), in situ data (e.g., flux towers, plant traits), and modeling approaches.

Tropical forests are central to the functioning of the Earth system: they regulate climate, are biodiversity hotspots, and store vast amounts of carbon in their biomass and soils. Yet, their responses to climate and land-use change are increasingly recognized as nonlinear, with the potential for abrupt, self-propelling shifts towards alternative states. The existence of such tipping points for African tropical forests—home to the world’s second-largest rainforest block—have been far less investigated than for for the Amazon. And generally speaking, Africa, tropical forests remain a major blindspot in global tropical forest ecology, which contrasts with the major services that this biome provide.

Central African forests are indeed among the most carbon-dense on Earth, host the planet’s largest tropical peatland complex, and have functioned as a robust carbon sink in recent decades. At the same time, they are subject to mounting pressures: deforestation, forest degradation, and rapid climatic changes. The ecological and climatic specificities of African forests reinforce the need for focused study on the area. Their floristic composition, biogeochemistry, edaphic conditions, fire regimes, and anthropogenic pressures differ markedly from other tropical regions. Ignoring these regional specificities risks overgeneralizing pantropical assessments and underestimating the unique vulnerabilities—or potential resilience—of African systems.

This session seeks to address this critical research gap by bringing together studies that combine field observations, remote sensing, and process-based model simulations that examine the main biogeochemical cycles of African tropical forests, and investigate their functioning, resilience, and potential tipping dynamics.

Natural forest expansion is occurring across many regions due to the combined effect of climatic and land-use changes. This process is constrained by multiple factors acting at different spatial and temporal scales. Broad-scale latitudinal and elevational gradients of primary vegetation successions are mostly attributed to global warming, whereas the abandonment of agricultural activities is one of the most important social-economic facilitators of local secondary successions. The interaction between climatic and human-related drivers make the analysis of forest expansion particularly multifaceted and complex.
This session invites contributions that use spatially-explicit diachronic approaches—including optical/SAR/LiDAR remote sensing, historical cartography and aerial photos, permanent plots, ecological modeling, and socioeconomic analysis— to track where, why and with what consequences forests expand. We will favor multidisciplinary studies focusing on the combined effects on biodiversity, habitat structure, landscape dynamics, and the socio-economic implications for economies, livelihoods, and cultural landscapes across multiple temporal and spatial scales.
Although many local studies on this topic exist, most of the analyses have either a short temporal extent or a limited spatial scale. Historical data such as vegetation, cadastral, landscape planning maps, and aerial photographs are geographical datasets that have been used globally to quantify changes and develop forecasting models. Nevertheless, standardization and homogenization are required. Therefore, in this session, we aim to bring together experts approaching the topic from different perspectives and focusing on various biomes worldwide.

Forest ecosystems face unprecedented pressure, with about one hectare of tropical forest lost or degraded every second, and over half destroyed since the 1960s (IUCN, 2021). While deforestation is easier to detect, forest degradation is harder to monitor but often causes greater losses of key ecosystem services (Qin et al., 2021). Climate change further intensifies degradation drivers, shifting forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources; in Europe alone, 168 million tons of CO₂-equivalent are lost annually due to climate-induced disturbances (Seidl et al., 2014).
Nature-based solutions (NBS), such as forest landscape restoration (FLR), provide vital opportunities to reverse these trends and restore ecological, social, climatic, and economic benefits. Major international commitments, including the Bonn Challenge and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, underscore the urgency of scaling restoration. At the regional level, the EU has launched research and innovation programs, such as Interreg CE-RENFORCE and H2020-SUPERB, to address the societal, economic, and policy dimensions of forest degradation and restoration.
Despite such efforts, forest degradation remains insufficiently understood due to inconsistent definitions, transboundary impacts, and limited monitoring tools. This session aims to advance knowledge by gathering insights into monitoring approaches, stakeholder perspectives, and policy dimensions of NBS and FLR under climate change. We welcome contributions on:

Modelling and predicting forest degradation drivers.
Impacts of degradation on ecosystem services.
Stakeholder perspectives and policy initiatives for NBS in FLR.
Innovative, cross-scale restoration strategies, including co-benefits and resilience under climate change.
IUCN (2021) Deforestation And Forest Degradation. IUCN Issues Brief. February 2021. Available at: https://iucn.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/deforestation-forest_degradation_issues_brief_2021.pdf
Qin Y, Xiao X, Wigneron JP, et al (2021) Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Nature Climate Change 2021 11:5 11:442–448.
Seidl R, Schelhaas MJ, Rammer W, Verkerk PJ (2014) Increasing forest disturbances in Europe and their impact on carbon storage. Nat Clim Chang 4:806–810.

In recent years, carbon sequestration by forests has attracted much interest as a mitigation approach and as a valuable nature-based option to address climate change mitigation challenges, to protect forest ecosystems, and to support socioeconomic and environmental services. The technological advancements and the constant focus of the scientific community have boosted the implementation of forest management practices that support the multiple functions of various forest types, soil and biodiversity conservation, the prevention of major disturbances (large droughts, wildfires, impacts of hurricanes, heavy snowfalls and floods, etc.), and the increase of forest carbon stock capacity and wood-use pathways in the short, medium, and long terms. This session aims to contribute to a better understanding and to shed light on the forests’ capacities to mitigate climate change, bringing together the latest advances from multi- and interdisciplinary studies (e.g., advanced ICTs, modeling, climatology, hydrology, soil science, or ecology), while considering the broad range of other forest values and ecosystem services in the context of bioeconomy and rural development. Research on tree health monitoring, co-created and co-designed by the array of local stakeholders representing different pedoclimatic zones for improved coordination and more tailored responses at the local level, increasing resilience to natural disasters, is also welcome. We invite forest scientists and experts working in other related disciplines, such as climatology and biophysical and socio-economic modeling, to share their findings within this session and improve the science-based knowledge on the environmental benefits, the social acceptability, and the economic value of forest-based mitigation actions.

Drylands cover 41% of Earth’s land surface, are home to over a third of the world’s population, store a third of global soil organic carbon and significantly contribute to the trend and interannual variability of the net land carbon sink. At the same time, drylands are vulnerable to climate and land-use change, and projected intensifying climate extremes, and disturbances pose potential threats to future ecosystem services and livelihoods. Yet, much about dryland ecosystem dynamics remains poorly understood, in part because of the importance of rapid-onset and highly localized events, emphasizing the need for improved understanding of dryland processes and their response to global change.

This session welcomes studies that advance our understanding of ecosystem dynamics in drylands, their role in carbon, water, and nutrient cycling, and the implications for ecosystem resilience under current and future global change. We specifically encourage submissions that (i) focus on interactions among dryland ecology, hydrology, and climatology; (ii) present the development or application of novel approaches to quantify and characterize carbon-water-ecosystem interactions across space and time; and (iii) address challenges such as temporal and spatial variability and heterogeneity, pulse-driven dynamics, and measurement and modeling needs specific to drylands.

After carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are among the most potent greenhouse gases (GHGs), exacerbating global warming. Their rapidly rising concentrations in the atmosphere require urgent action. Forest ecosystems play an important role in the exchange of GHGs with the atmosphere. It has been shown that not only soils but also trees can emit and/or consume CH4 and N2O in forests. Trees contribute to ecosystem exchanges in various ways. They can uptake and transport soil-produced CH4 and N2O to the atmosphere; produce and consume both gases in situ in tree tissues; and modify carbon and nitrogen turnover in adjacent soils. However, the individual processes involved beyond net ecosystem GHG exchange remain unclear and seem to depend on various factors, including tree characteristics, tree species traits, forest ecosystem type, environmental variables, and seasons. Interactions between soil, trees, and the atmosphere play a crucial role in controlling the global budget of these gases.
This session aims to bring together scientists studying the CH4 and N2O cycles in forest ecosystems under different climatic, hydrological and scale conditions. This is crucial for improving our understanding of CH4 and N2O exchange in these ecosystems. We welcome contributions on production and consumption processes and mechanisms in soils and plant/tree tissues, as well as gas transport processes within the soil-tree-atmosphere continuum. We highly encourage gas flux measurements from forest soils, cryptogams, tree stems, leaves, and canopies using chamber systems or integrated ecosystem approaches (e.g., flux towers with eddy covariance, satellites, or modelling). We also encourage methodological studies investigating CH₄ and N₂O exchange in forest ecosystems.

Permafrost peatlands are found across the permafrost region. While the dominant landforms of permafrost peatlands vary, these fragile ecosystems have acted as natural sinks for atmospheric carbon for millennia and store a globally significant portion of the terrestrial soil organic carbon pool. Intact permafrost peatlands are vital components of the northern hydrological system, regulating local water levels through interactions with both groundwater and surface water networks, storing water and dampening hydrologic responses, and acting as sources of organic matter and potential contaminants for aquatic ecosystems. They provide key habitats for birds, mammals, and highly biodiverse vegetation. As a result, permafrost peatlands provide key ecosystem services, including the provision of traditional medicines, food, and drinking water for indigenous and local communities. Warming temperatures have recently driven widespread permafrost thaw and thermokarst formation, transforming these peatlands and causing drastic shifts in their biogeochemistry, hydrology, ecology, and morphology. Model projections indicate that within decades permafrost peatlands across the northern circumpolar permafrost region are likely to undergo rapid changes resulting from thaw, with complete permafrost losses likely to occur in the southernmost regions of this bioclimatic envelope. Establishing the response trajectories of these ecosystems to climate warming is critical for accurately projecting future environmental change.
The goal of this session is to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion on the dynamics of permafrost peatlands under a rapidly changing climate, and to explore the mechanisms driving change in these ecosystems. To achieve this, we encourage submissions across disciplines related to permafrost peatlands, using a wide range of methods such as field observation, palaeoecology, lab experiments, modelling and simulations, remote sensing, and data synthesis and analysis. We particularly encourage studies on 1) carbon and nutrient biogeochemical cycling (including stocks, fluxes, and upscaling efforts), 2) export of carbon, nutrients, and contaminants and their impact on aquatic ecosystems, 3) records illustrating thaw-related changes to hydrology and vegetation, 4) remote sensing methods for detecting changes, 5) impact of disturbances (natural and anthropogenic), and 6) impact of a changing permafrost peatland landscape on northern communities.

The cold season dominates most of the year in Arctic and alpine regions, but it is understudied due to challenging working conditions and accessibility. However, plant and microbial activity, and biogeochemical turnover, continue under snow cover and sub-zero temperatures. Such activity is likely to play an important role, not only in the winter, but year-round in regulating ecosystem functioning, and carbon and nutrient cycling, which affects plant productivity, phenology and -diversity .

Moreover, at high latitudes and many high elevation areas, the winter period is experiencing the highest rates of climate warming – leading to system altering phenomena including rain-on-snow events and snow cover loss. These phenomena affect the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of terrestrial ecosystems, and may trigger vegetation damage and permafrost carbon loss. Addressing the cold-season knowledge gap is therefore essential – not only to gain a comprehensive understanding of high latitude ecosystems year-round, but also their vulnerability to warmer winters as a result of amplified climate change.

This interdisciplinary session unites researchers working on cold season biogeochemistry, microbiology and plant-soil processes, across the Arctic-boreal region and in Alpine environments. By bringing together varied perspectives, we form an integrated ecosystem approach that considers drivers, transformations, feedbacks, and interdependencies of cold-season processes. We welcome studies focusing on observational, experimental and modelling approaches to understand winter plant and microbial functioning, biogeochemical cycling, and associated impacts on the growing season and year-round dynamics – emphasizing responses to changing seasonality and winter climate regimes.

Tropical peatlands store around 105 Gt carbon (C), although their total extent remains uncertain due to inadequate data. In a natural condition, tropical peatlands are long-term C stores and support livelihoods, but anthropogenic disturbances are increasing in extent. These transformations result in high C loss, reduced C storage, increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, loss of hydrological integrity, peat subsidence, increased risk of fire, and negative social impacts. For agricultural peatlands, changes in nutrient storage and cycling necessitate fertilizer use, with enhanced emissions of N2O. Under a warming climate, these impacts are likely to intensify and reduce the benefits to rural communities. This session welcomes contributions on all aspects of tropical peatland science, including peatland mapping and monitoring; the impact of climate on past, present and future tropical peatland formation, accumulation and C dynamics; GHG and nutrient flux dynamics; management strategies for GHG emissions mitigation and the maintenance or restoration of C sequestration and storage; and valuing ancestral knowledge of peatlands. Field based, experimental and modelling studies of intact and modified systems from all tropical regions are welcomed.

Peatland restoration for conservation purposes has been implemented for decades now, but recently the focus has been shifting towards a reconciliation of the production of biomass with ecological goals, especially the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while peatland management in conservation-focusses projects increasingly has to be adapted to climate change. Management measures include, but are not limited to, productive use of wet peatlands (paludiculture), improved water management in conventional agriculture and forestry, photovoltaic on wet peatlands, solutions for peat originating from infrastructure projects and innovative approaches in conservation-focused rewetting projects. We invite studies addressing all types of peatland management and their impacts on GHG exchange, ecosystem services and biodiversity. Work on all spatial scales from laboratory to global level addressing biogeochemical and biological aspects as well as experimental and modelling studies are welcome. Furthermore, we invite contributions addressing policy coherence e.g., in the context of the EU Nature Restoration Law and evaluating policy instruments for initiating and implementing new management practices on organic soils. Implementation and efficiency of management practices depends not only on hydrogeology and climate but also on other regional factors. Therefore, we hope to host contributions from different geographical regions where peatlands are important including boreal, temperate and tropical peatlands.

Oxidation of peat organic carbon is a critical determinant of greenhouse gas emissions from peatland ecosystems. This session aims to bridge the gap between biogeochemical processes at the pore scale and their environmental impacts at the ecosystem scale. At the heart of peat carbon oxidation are microorganisms that act on molecular carbon substrates, driving biogeochemical reactions at a microscale. These microbial processes are fundamental, yet they operate on a scale that poses challenges for direct observation and measurement. Our current methodologies allow us to measure processes at intermediate scales, providing valuable data on carbon turnover and peatland dynamics. However, there remains a significant challenge in inferring processes at the microscale and extrapolating or linking these drivers to the ecosystem scale, on which the implications of carbon emissions and climate change are most profound.
This scientific session will focus aims to integrate across the multiple scales of peat carbon oxidation. We will explore:
Microscale Processes: Understanding the role of biogeochemistry and microorganisms in peat decomposition and the processes that determine peat carbon oxidation potentials and rates.
Intermediate-Scale Measurements: Applying techniques and methodologies to measure carbon turnover and emissions, the insights they provide in underlying processes, and techniques for upscaling.
Challenges in Upscaling: Addressing the links between small-scale processes and ecosystem-scale emissions. This includes modeling approaches and integrative methods to connect scales.

Managed agricultural ecosystems (grassland and cropland) are an important source and/or sink for greenhouse gases (GHG) as well as for reactive trace gases. Representative measurements and modelling under typical conditions as well as for potential mitigation options are necessary as a basis for recommendations to policy makers and farmers.
Due to the simultaneous influence of various environmental drivers and management activities (e.g. fertilizer application, harvest, grazing) the flux patterns are often complex and difficult to attribute to individual drivers. Moreover, management related mitigation options may often result in trade-offs between different GHG or between emission of GHG and reactive gases like NH3, NOx, or VOCs. To investigate these interactions, the session addresses experimentalists and modelers working on carbon and nitrogen cycling processes and related fluxes on plot, field, landscape, and regional scale. It is open to a wide range of studies including the development and application of new devices, methods, and model approaches as well as field observations and process studies. Particularly welcome are studies on multiple gases and on the full carbon, nitrogen or GHG budgets. We also encourage contributions about the applicability and overall potential of mitigation options.

A transformation towards sustainable agriculture is essential to secure food for both current and future generations while restoring natural resources. Agricultural productivity today faces multiple challenges, including climate change, water scarcity, limited access to essential inputs, socio-economic disparities, and rising global demand for agricultural products. Additionally, agriculture must play a pivotal role in mitigating climate change, reducing environmental pollution, and preserving biodiversity. Addressing these complex demands necessitates a comprehensive evaluation of alternative land management practices across local to global scales, with a focus on assessing entire agricultural production systems rather than isolated products.
This session will address the modeling of agricultural systems in the context of global change, focusing on challenges related to climate change adaptation and mitigation, sustainable intensification, and the environmental impacts of agricultural production. We invite contributions on methodological approaches, data innovations, assessments of climate impacts and adaptation strategies, environmental consequences, greenhouse gas mitigation, and economic evaluations.

Grasslands cover nearly 40% of the Earth’s ice-free land surface, and their soils play a key role in climate regulation by storing about 20% of global carbon (C) stocks. These ecosystems, however, sit at the intersection between opportunity and risk. On the one hand, they have the capacity to sequester C and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through improved management. On the other hand, decades of intensification have contributed to grassland degradation, soil C losses, and increased CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ emissions. Effective practices, such as adaptive grazing managements, silvopastoral systems, or integrating legumes or organic fertilisers, could unlock a mitigation potential of up to 150 Tg of soil C annually (CO₂ eq), while also reducing dependence on synthetic N fertilisers.

Yet, major challenges remain. Evidence gaps persist regarding the mechanisms that regulate soil C sequestration and GHG mitigation under diverse grassland systems and environmental conditions. And at the same time, these systems face additional pressures: land-use conflicts, biodiversity decline, climate change, shifting protein demands, and socioeconomic transformations in rural areas.

Our session invites contributions that shed light on the impacts of different grassland restoration and management practices on soil nutrient C and N cycling, with an emphasis on soil C sequestration and GHG emission and mitigation, to advance the role of grasslands in climate mitigation and sustainable food systems.

We encourage contributions from all regions, as diverse perspectives and experiences are crucial for a holistic understanding of these issues. This session will include, but is not restricted to, field and modelling studies, as well as mesocosm studies exploring hypotheses related to C and N cycling in grassland soils.

We invite participants from around the world to share their insights and contribute to a global dialogue on advancing grassland management practices.

Climate change is increasingly challenging the sustainability and productivity of fruit crops worldwide, particularly in marginal land. Drought, salinity, and temperature extremes critically affect plant performance, reducing nutrient uptake and carbon assimilation. In this session, we aim to explore how approaches integrating stable isotope analysis (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ2H, δ18O, δ³⁴S) into plant phenomics (RGB, infrared, chlorophyll fluorescence, hyperspectral) can help elucidate crop responses to abiotic stressors associated with global climate shifts and support the selection of resilient genotypes.
We invite contributions that investigate physiological plasticity and adaptive traits of fruit crops, such as grapevine, apple, pear, peach, etc., using isotopic markers to trace water use efficiency, nitrogen dynamics, and sulphur assimilation under stress. While isotopic analysis can provide valuable standalone insights, we encourage especially studies combining the isotopic data with physiological plant phenotyping, including, but not limited to, chlorophyll fluorescence indicators as early-warning proxies for photosynthetic impairment. Particular emphasis will be given to multi-scalar studies linking soil-plant-atmosphere interactions, genotype-specific resilience, and terroir-specific influences on plant metabolism.
The session will also welcome comparative analyses across diverse pedoclimatic contexts, applications in plant breeding for resilience, and methodological advancements in isotopic and phenotyping techniques. By integrating biogeochemistry, eco-physiology, and agronomy, we seek to foster a comprehensive understanding of how fruit crops can cope with environmental extremes and guide the development of climate-smart agricultural systems.

Global environmental change affects interactions among plants, soils, and microbial communities in many ways and strongly influences terrestrial biogeochemical cycles. Therefore, understanding the underlying processes and large-scale patterns of how these changes impact soils across pedo-climatic regions is essential for developing sustainable land management options and accurately representing major biogeochemical fluxes in land surface models.

We invite contributions to this session exploring the impacts of environmental change on plant-soil interactions, the biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), as well as soil microbial diversity and functionality at varying spatial and temporal scales. Contributions can be from manipulative field experiments, observations of natural environmental gradients, or modeling studies. We particularly welcome submissions that adopt novel approaches, such as molecular or isotopic analyses, or that synthesize outputs from large-scale field experiments focusing on plant-soil-microbe feedback in response to global change. We also welcome studies that address gaps in our understanding of soil dynamics in remote and understudied regions.

This is a continuation of our earlier, successful EGU sessions on similar topics. Through this session, we aim to continue bringing people together to learn from each other's studies on soils and environmental change in a variety of global pedogenic and climatic settings.

Interactions between plants and their environment shape terrestrial fluxes, biochemical cycles, and agro-ecosystem productivity. However, we still lack detailed knowledge of how these interactions impact plant access to soil resources and, hence, plant growth, particularly under deficit conditions. The main challenge arises from the complexity inherent to biophysical and biochemical processes in soils and plants across multiple scales. To address these knowledge gaps, an improved understanding of soil-plant-related transfer processes is needed.
Experimental techniques such as non-invasive imaging and three-dimensional root system modeling tools have deepened our insights into the functioning of water and solute transport processes in the soil-plant system. Quantitative approaches that integrate across disciplines and scales constitute stepping-stones to foster our understanding of fundamental biophysical processes at the interface between soils and plants.
This session targets research investigating soil-plant-related resource transfer processes across different scales (from the rhizosphere to the global scale) and welcomes scientists from multiple disciplines encompassing soil and plant sciences across natural as well as agricultural systems. We are specifically inviting contributions on the following topics:
- Bridging the gap between biologically and physically oriented research in soil and plant sciences
- Measuring and modeling of soil-plant hydraulics, water and solute fluxes through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum across scales.
- Identification of plant strategies to better access and use resources from the soil, including under abiotic stress(es)
- Novel experimental and modeling techniques assessing belowground processes such as root growth, root water, and nutrient uptake, root exudation, microbial interactions, and soil aggregation
- Mechanistic understanding of plant water use and gas exchange regulation under drought and their implementation in Earth system models

Mycorrhizal fungi are central to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, playing a critical role in ecological processes such as nutrient cycling and carbon storage. Mycorrhizal fungi enhance nutrient uptake by plants, primary productivity, decomposition, and they contribute to organic matter accumulation. This session aims to bring together research investigating the diverse roles and functions of mycorrhizal fungi in forest, grassland, wetland, and other “natural” ecosystems, with a focus on ectomycorrhizal, arbuscular, and ericoid mycorrhizal associations. We will explore how mycorrhizal fungi drive ecosystem functioning in its broadest sense, and how these processes respond to environmental changes, from climate change to management. We welcome contributions from research conducted across all biomes and scales, ranging from the global to petri dish environment, encompassing observational, experimental, and modeling approaches. By fostering discussion and sharing cutting-edge research, this session aims to deepen our understanding of mycorrhizal fungi as mediators of ecosystem function, clarify their ecological importance, and highlight the need for continued exploration in this rapidly evolving field.

Cryptogams represent diverse photosynthetic organismal groups that are not flowering (i.e., algae, lichens, and bryophytes), usually forming complex but often inconspicuous communities together with cyanobacteria, other hetero- or autotrophic bacteria, microfungi, and archaea.

Due to their poikilohydric lifestyle and lack of stabilizing tissue, cryptogamic/microbial communities are outcompeted by vascular plants in temperate climates and are thus mainly restricted to extreme habitats where vascular plant growth is limited. They colonize a broad range of niches, including the uppermost millimeters of soil (epi- and endogaeic), tree barks and leaves (epiphytic and epiphyllic), and rock surfaces and interiors (epi- and endolithic), as well as artificial substrates such as concrete, glass, or tar. In temperate regions, such communities thrive in shaded forest understories, dry microsites such as path edges, and nutrient-poor grasslands. In hot and cold drylands, their occurrence is largely confined to the open and not vegetated soil surface, where they form biological soil crusts (biocrusts). Biocrusts are estimated to cover ~30% of warm and hot drylands, while their extent in cold deserts remains less well quantified.

These communities are key components of ecosystems, but the magnitude of their contribution to numerous processes is still uncertain (biogeochemical and water cycling, atmospheric processes, biodiversity, etc.). In this session, we ask for contributions on the biodiversity and functional roles of cryptogams from local to global processes such as nutrient and water cycling, trace gas exchange with the atmosphere, soil erosion, mineral weathering, and vascular plant interactions. Studies of their responses to global change as well as other potential threats are also welcomed.

Root exudates amount to approximately 9% of global annual plant gross primary productivity. These chemically heterogeneous compounds are released into the soil where they contribute to forming the rhizosphere, the narrow zone around the roots that is directly influenced by root activity. In the rhizosphere, root exudates are involved in complex chemical, physical and biological processes – they influence the soil microbiome, affect the soil pH and alter soil physical properties, impacting plant water, carbon and nutrient relations. Despite their importance, sampling and measuring exudates remains challenging and key questions about their composition, persistence and function remain open.
This session aims to advance our knowledge on the role of root exudation across all terrestrial ecosystems. We invite contributions that study root exudation from a molecular to an ecosystem level. Among others, we especially welcome studies covering the following topics: novel methods in sampling and analyzing root exudation; deciphering how much carbon is exuded in diverse ecosystems from grasslands, agricultural systems to savannas or forests; environmental influences on root exudation amount and composition including nutrient and water availability or soil and air temperature; the role of exudates in mitigating biotic and abiotic stressors; the functional role of exudates in nutrient uptake; how do root exudates shape the soil microbiome; can exudates change soil physical properties; how stable are root exudates in the soil and how long do they persist in the soil environment; is there a tradeoff between root growth and root exudation; how do we model root exudation across spatial and temporal scales.
We encourage researchers across multiple disciplines and backgrounds to contribute to this session, including experimental manipulations, field observations and modelling from molecular to global scales. Collectively, insights from this session will help to improve our understanding of the role of root exudation in the global carbon cycle and their function in rhizosphere processes. This knowledge will help in improving predictions on soil carbon storage and plant responses to environmental stress which is crucial for developing effective strategies in sustainable land management and land conservation.

The study of nitrogen (N) processes in soils has a long and distinguished history. Recent research efforts have targeted the direct quantification of N turnover in the soil plant atmosphere system across scales. Nevertheless, methodological constraints, the high spatial and temporal variability of soil N transformation, and the multitude of interacting factors determining N availability and loss from soils presents significant challenges that make accurate quantification difficult, thereby limiting our quantitative understanding of the N turnover.
Although the factors controlling N turnover in soils are relatively well established under laboratory conditions, transposing these relationships to the field and landscape scales remains a significant challenge. The absence of data-sets collected in-situ impedes the validation of N processes, such as mineralization and denitrification simulated via process-based models, thereby rendering their results at field and regional scales highly uncertain. However, current ecosystem management challenges require accurate predictions of N fate to enable sustainable management that minimizes environmental losses.

We invite contributions from the following fields:
• Methodological advances in measuring and modelling of soil N processes, spanning from the micro- to the landscape scale;
• Measurements of N fluxes including specific loss pathways under field or field-like conditions with a focus on identifying controlling factors;
• Comparative studies demonstrating/evaluating novel approaches to constrain N turnover such as incubation under He/O2 atmosphere, 15N-tracer technique, N2O isotopologue approaches or other innovative methods;
• Process-based modelling of soil N processes at various scales;
• Linking nitrogen transformation rates to the function and structure of the soil microbial community.

Soil heterogeneity—spanning physical, chemical, and biological variations—strongly shapes root growth, redox conditions, microbial activity, and biogeochemical cycling. These interactions influence carbon and nutrient dynamics, greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater quality, and broader ecosystem processes. This session explores how soil heterogeneity governs biogeochemical processes across spatial and temporal scales, from nano to macro. We welcome studies on nutrient and contaminant behavior, greenhouse gas fluxes, carbon storage, mineral transformations, and related topics, using laboratory, field, modeling, or novel methodological approaches that advance our understanding of soils and sediments in biogeochemical cycles.

Subsoils - defined as soil below 30 cm or B-horizon - contribute to more than half of the total soil carbon stocks and store substantial amounts of nutrients and water. Despite their critical ecosystem services including long-term storage of carbon, nutrient and water acquisition by plants, and serving as a reservoir of biodiversity distinct from the topsoil, they remain under-represented in research. However, understanding these functions and how management practices can promote these is essential in the face of increasing climate variability and uncertainty.
In this session, we aim to bring together studies working across disciplines to shed light on the role of subsoils in terrestrial ecosystems. We invite studies exploring subsoil processes through experimental, observational, and modeling approaches, including those that integrate soil–plant–atmosphere interactions. As this session aims to recognise the importance of subsoil, we encourage results from single experiments, modelling, commentaries or reviews that include deep soil horizons and highlight its role in climate change mitigation, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem resilience.

Soil microorganisms are responsible for essential soil functions, including nutrient cycling, carbon transformation, and climate regulation. Their metabolism and growth rely on C and energy as well as nutrients (e.g., N and P) and electron acceptors (O2, NO3, etc. ... or C itself). After they die, the remaining necromass is further transformed or stabilized in soil organic matter. This session integrates experimental and modelling insights to elucidate the energy and matter flows driven by soil microbial metabolism, their dependency on environmental conditions, and the implications for soil functions.

We welcome submissions seeking to understand soil microbial metabolism, growth and death, encompassing the diverse transformations and interactions these involve. Topics of interest include characterization of microbial activity and turnover using advanced methods (e.g., isotope tracing, calorimetry, metagenomics), microbial ecophysiology and stoichiometry, physiological responses to (micro)environmental changes, carbon and energy-use efficiency, alongside approaches to understand microbial functional responses (e.g. dynamic modelling, artificial intelligence). We aim to stimulate interdisciplinary discussions to advance our understanding of soil biology at scales from the mechanistic understanding of biogeochemical processes to global change.

We are excited to have Prof. Michaela Dippold (University of Tübingen) as an invited speaker for the session.

Extreme climatic events and environmental disturbances such as droughts, floods, wildfires, heatwaves, and permafrost thaw are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity, profoundly altering terrestrial biogeochemical cycles. These events can disrupt soil carbon dynamics, nutrient cycling and redox processes, affecting ecosystem functioning. They may have long-lasting legacy effects that feed back to the climate system. At the same time, adaptive management strategies are urgently needed to mitigate ecosystem vulnerability, enhance soil and ecosystem resilience, and sustain critical biogeochemical functions under future extremes.
This session invites contributions that explore how biogeochemical cycles respond to, and recover from, extreme events across spatial and temporal scales. We welcome studies using field observations, laboratory experiments, novel analytical techniques, modeling approaches, data synthesis, or innovative management interventions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Impacts of wildfire on carbon and nutrient cycling, soil chemistry, and recovery trajectories
• Flooding and waterlogging effects on redox processes, mineral transformations, and element mobilization or sequestration
• Drought-induced changes in soil structure, microbial activity, and decomposition dynamics
• Permafrost thaw and the release, transformation, and fate of aged carbon and nutrients
• Adaptive management strategies to enhance the resilience of ecosystems and biogeochemical processes under climatic extremes
By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, this session aims to advance mechanistic understanding of biogeochemical responses and feedbacks under extreme conditions and to identify adaptive management options that strengthen ecosystem resilience in a rapidly changing world.

The extreme weather events are characterised by short bursts of intense exchange of mass, energy and momentum in the Earth system, originating due to thermodynamic and dynamic reasons. These events impact the functioning of ecosystems, visible in their immediate carbon uptake, water loss, and associated energy exchanges with the atmosphere. However, if the ecosystems are frequently exposed to such episodes, their physiological responses may also adapt to maximise their carbon uptake or minimise their water loss. In future, the extreme events are projected to be more severe and frequent and thus would impact biosphere-atmosphere exchanges greatly.

Such effects can be identified from the long-term time series of ecosystem-atmosphere flux measurements using a wide range of in situ and remote sensing (RS) observations. The eddy covariance (EC) technique provides the most accurate measurements of ecosystem-atmosphere exchanges, and they have now existed for several decades at multiple locations on the globe. RS allows for synoptic-scale monitoring of the biosphere-atmosphere fluxes and detection of extreme events in real time. For instance, precipitation data based on GPM can be employed to detect extreme precipitation and related extremes such as dry/wet spells, tropical cyclones, and others. Likewise, satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) data from MODIS or ECOSTRESS can be utilised to capture thermal extremes like heat/cold waves. The EC data helps in validating RS data, and when employed in integration with RS data, it would yield robust results. An array of techniques, such as different suitable time series, power spectrum and causal inference approach, can establish detailed insights.

In this session, we invite submissions addressing these different aspects of the influence of extreme events on the ecosystem-atmosphere exchanges of gases and energy across scales. We encourage using the long-term measurements to identify such episodes of ‘disturbance’ and examine their impacts on the biosphere-atmosphere exchanges.

The need to understand and predict ecosystem responses to global change, and its impacts on the interconnected carbon, water, and nutrient cycles, is more pressing than ever. As terrestrial ecosystems face increasing exposure to climate stressors such as drought, heat, or disturbance, improving our understanding of vegetation functioning, both above- and belowground, is critical for enhancing the predictive capacity of our forecast tools.

This session focuses on vegetation functional responses to global change, with particular emphasis on above- and belowground processes under stress and the interactions between them. Because these components are tightly coupled, through processes such as carbon allocation, water uptake, and nutrient exchange, studying both is essential to fully understand vegetation function, resistance, and resilience under environmental stress. We aim to foster discussion on how plant traits, physiological responses, plasticity, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes are affected by stress, and how these responses scale from individuals to entire ecosystems.

We welcome studies across a range of scales and methods, from greenhouse and mesocosm experiments to large-scale field manipulations, remote sensing, and process-based modelling. We particularly encourage contributions presenting novel ideas and hypotheses, including those from early-career researchers, and aim to create a space where such ideas can be discussed openly.

Extremes in temperature, vapor pressure deficit, and soil moisture severely endanger critical functions and services provided by terrestrial ecosystems. Both increasingly extreme long-term trends in environmental conditions and extreme events such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and unseasonal freezes directly impact key physiological processes such as carbon uptake, transpiration, growth, and mortality. An abundance or scarcity of water, atmospheric dryness, heat, and cold can operate separately or in tandem to cause reductions in terrestrial gross and net primary productivity and elevated risks of plant mortality. However, due to the complexity of these interactions and the scarcity of continuous time series, it is difficult to quantify the magnitude and timing of temperature and water stress-related impacts on ecosystem function. As climate change accelerates the occurrence and severity of climatic extremes with consequences for terrestrial ecosystems, we must harmonize our efforts to characterize plant and ecosystem functions and develop frameworks for monitoring and prediction.

In this session, we broadly explore the roles of temperature extremes, evaporative demand, and soil moisture in carbon, water, and energy relations, along with plant mortality across various spatial and temporal scales. We encourage submissions dealing with novel approaches for measuring and modeling plant and soil water status, responses to extreme conditions, and their impacts on ecosystem function. We invite contributions on these topics at scales ranging from individual plant tissues to entire ecosystems, applying experimental, observational, or modeling approaches and dealing with diverse disciplines such as plant physiology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology, land management, and biogeochemistry.

Forest disturbance regimes—defined by their size, frequency, and severity—are projected to intensify under ongoing global warming, impacting vegetation productivity, growth, and vitality. Hotter droughts, in particular, are driving widespread canopy dieback and increasing tree mortality rates. A robust assessment of forest vulnerability and the mechanisms underpinning responses to disturbance is essential for characterizing climate risks and informing adaptation strategies.
This session invites contributions that address climate change effects on forest ecosystems across scales and biomes, from observations to projections. In particular, we seek submissions on:
• Quantification of how natural and anthropogenic disturbances influence forest productivity, health, and growth.
• Multidisciplinary approaches (from ground to remote sensing) to monitoring tree vulnerability at local, regional, and global levels.
• Mapping and forecasting forest mortality and dieback under diverse climate change scenarios.
• Mechanistic and data-driven models of climate and environmental controls on forest vigor and growth, across scales and processes (e.g., wood formation, leaf phenology, shoot growth, canopy dynamics).
• Vulnerability of old-growth and senescent forests to climate change.
• Assessment of forest resilience to drought and other extreme events (e.g., frost, freeze–thaw cycles).
• Standardization of growth-monitoring techniques for forests experiencing extreme climate events (heat waves, droughts, cold spells).
• Adaptive management strategies to mitigate forest vulnerability.
• Decision-support tools for forestry and land management that integrate multiple stakeholders and multifunctional objectives.

Tropical forests are biomes of global significance due to their exceptional biodiversity, carbon storage capacity, and key role in the hydrological cycle. In recent decades, ecosystems across South America, Central America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia have experienced increasing pressures from human activities, climate change, and intensified natural variability (e.g., extremes). These drivers have altered the cycling of nutrients, carbon, water, and energy, while also affecting human livelihoods. Although such disturbances have profound impacts, concurrent recovery processes are often overlooked in assessing their net effects.

In this session, we aim to place a particular emphasis on the dynamics of disturbance and recovery in tropical forest ecosystems. We invite contributions that examine the consequences of these contrasting processes across multiple dimensions, including above- and belowground biomass, forest-atmosphere interactions, carbon budgets, biodiversity, and social livelihoods. We welcome studies using diverse approaches, ranging from experimental and field-based investigations to remote sensing and modeling. Our goal is to foster a holistic understanding of how disturbance and recovery shape both the current and future states of tropical vegetation and the communities that depend on it.

The capacity of forests to mitigate climate change depends on their ability to cope with and adapt to global change drivers, such as more frequent and more intense extreme events (e.g., droughts and heatwaves) and concomitant changes in atmospheric CO2 and reactive nitrogen and sulphur deposition. While these drivers have often been studied in isolation, their interactive effects on forest health and ecosystem functioning remains poorly understood. In the proposed session, we aim to bring together research communities working on assessing climate extremes and atmospheric deposition impacts on forests. We particularly welcome contributions linking processes at different vertical and spatial scales,e.g., ground-plot-based observations on soil and trees and their interactions, and how they relate to spatial, remotely-sensed regional/continental assessments and modelling. Moreover, we encourage contributions providing examples of interactions and synergies between forest monitoring networks (e.g., eLTER, ICP Forests and ICOS and other international monitoring networks) in integrating information at different scales to gain a holistic understanding of ecosystem functioning and how this can support forest related management, guidance and policy. Lastly, we invite contributions from novel manipulation experiments simulating realistic scenarios of variations in global change drivers and impacts on forest ecosystems. The session is organised within the framework of the CLEANFOREST COST Action (https://cleanforest.eu/).

Understanding plant responses to climate extremes is crucial for predicting climate change and its effects on the biosphere. Heat waves and hot droughts are increasing in frequency, intensity, and duration, yet the microclimates plants experience often differ substantially from ambient macroclimates. Predicting heat effects on plant functioning therefore requires insight into both the mechanisms driving microclimate variation and the physiological responses of plants to heat.

This session features contributions that integrate the physical sciences and plant physiology to advance understanding of how microclimate variation influences plant functioning from molecules to the biosphere. Topics may include model development and testing, observational or experimental data, and interdisciplinary approaches that quantify or predict microclimate dynamics or physiological responses to climate extremes. Submissions focusing on energy balance, canopy structure, heat tolerance or acclimation, or novel modelling or measurement techniques are particularly encouraged.

Due to climate change, terrestrial ecosystems are experiencing higher air temperatures, which also lead to higher vapour pressure deficit. Together with changing precipitation patterns, these increases are causing more frequent and intense droughts in many regions. These severe hot droughts are, in turn, associated with pervasive effects and widespread impacts—from global freshwater decline and reduced vegetation growth to land degradation, food insecurity, increased forest mortality and fire activity.

Advances in in situ measurement methods, remote sensing and growing monitoring networks provide unprecedented information on the drivers of drought and plant responses. The automation and increasing affordability of new measurement methods are generating a wealth of new data, presenting a unique opportunity for modellers to improve simulations of water transport across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. In particular, this has the potential to improve the representation of plant-water interactions across scales–from the leaf-level to entire terrestrial ecosystems–along with more accurate carbon, water, and energy fluxes on land.

Despite these recent advances, transferring knowledge across disciplines (e.g. climate science, ecology, agronomy, hydrology and soil science) and scales (from individual leaves, plants, and up to the ecosystem and regional scales) remains a major challenge that hinders progress in drought research. This session aims to provide a platform to connect and exchange knowledge and establish links across scales and disciplines. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions that bring together a wide range of perspectives and, in particular, contributions led by students and early career researchers.

Plant hydraulics regulate water transport, photosynthesis and transpiration, thus controlling vegetation productivity, carbon uptake, and vulnerability to e.g. drought and heat. Key hydraulic traits such as conductivity and capacitance are fundamental to ecosystem resilience but remain challenging to monitor and model across scales. Vegetation water content (VWC) provides a critical integrative measure of hydraulic status and dynamics, offering actionable indicators for ecosystem monitoring, agricultural and forestry management, and early warning of stress. Nevertheless, hydraulic variables and VWC remain difficult to observe consistently: signals vary from leaf to landscape, are confounded by soil moisture, vegetation structure, and temperature, and exhibit strong diurnal/seasonal dynamics that challenge cross-sensor harmonisation and validation.

This session welcomes both methodological advances, applications and validations. We emphasise developments in passive and active microwave (radiometry, radar) retrievals, GNSS-based approaches (transmissometry, reflectometry), and optical/thermal methods, alongside in situ measurements (e.g., leaf/stem water potential, dielectric probes, dendrometry) and model-data integration.

We invite contributions that: (i) improve retrieval algorithms, including cross-frequency synergies; (ii) fuse microwave/optical/LiDAR with in situ data to bridge scales; (iii) quantify uncertainties and disentangle confounding factors; (iv) integrate observations into ecohydrological and land-surface models via data assimilation and machine learning, and advance model representation of plant hydraulics, improve the coupling between the water and carbon cycles, and make use of emerging observations; and (v) use hydraulic observations and products, including VWC and related metrics, to resilience and disturbance/recovery assessment, drought monitoring and early warning, phenology, and agricultural/forestry management.

Case studies, global syntheses, and contributions providing open datasets, intercomparisons and community benchmarks are encouraged. The session aims to foster discussion between attendees from various scientific communities approaching plant hydraulics from different perspectives.

Although climate change is a natural process, it is significantly stimulated by anthropogenic activities. The acceleration of climate change is directly connected with ecological stability, soil degradation, and hydrological extremes, which are considered as the main consequences of climate change. As climate change intensifies, extreme and unexpected weather events are becoming more frequent.
The aim of this session is to highlight a broad range of research methods and results related to climate change. This interdisciplinary session should reflect, discuss, and share scientific knowledge on a local and regional scale with the aim to increase innovative knowledge on climate change and its impacts, ecosystem response and new techniques to prevent and reduce the negative consequences.

This session encourages contributions from several fields related to:
- climate change impacts (biodiversity loss, rising temperatures, hydrological extremes, soil degradation, ecosystem response to climate change);
- droughts and floods; precipitation deficiency or extreme precipitation with solutions aimed at reducing the negative impacts;
- ecological stability and climate change; changes of ecological stability, deforestation, human interactions with the environment and evaluation of restoration success;
- green cities to increase the ecological stability of the urban landscape;
- techniques and methods to prevent and reduce the negative impacts of climate change (such as soil degradation, carbon sequestration, changes in natural, agricultural, and forest ecosystems, reduction of overall ecological stability and character of the landscape);
In addition, attention will be given to the sustainability of management practices, the importance of appropriate land use management as the main tool for preventing the degradation processes, the distribution and vitality of ecosystems, and improving the condition of forest ecosystems in order to increase the overall character of the landscape.

Land–atmosphere interactions often play a decisive role in shaping climate extremes. As climate change continues to exacerbate the occurrence of extreme events, a key challenge is to unravel how land states regulate the occurrence of droughts, heatwaves, intense precipitation and other extreme events. This session focuses on how natural and managed land surface conditions (e.g., soil moisture, soil temperature, vegetation state, surface albedo, snow or frozen soil) interact with other components of the climate system – via water, heat and carbon exchanges – and how these interactions affect the state and evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer. Moreover, emphasis is placed on the role of these interactions in alleviating or aggravating the occurrence and impacts of extreme events. We welcome studies using field measurements, remote sensing observations, theory and modelling to analyse this interplay under past, present and/or future climates and at scales ranging from local to global but with emphasis on larger scales.

Climate change mitigation in forest systems are among the most cost-effective and promoted mitigation measures, and include afforestation, forest restoration, forest protection, and forest management. However, the efficiency of these mitigation measures can vary depending on their specific location and the management strategies employed, and their impact on water, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services can be ambiguous. For instance, the ability of afforestation to continue sequestering carbon under climate change will depend critically on the future risks for fire, droughts, and pests.
Despite a growing body of literature, there are still knowledge gaps concerning the efficiency of forest-based measures in maintaining functionality under shifting hydroclimatic conditions. As forests are social-ecological systems, tackling this issue must be approached through an interdisciplinary lens and with an understanding of the biophysical and social, ecological, economic, and governance implications of these measures.
This session aims to explore and enhance the understanding of forests’ capacity to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change and examine the ecosystem services forests provide.
We invite contributions that present novel methods and tools, emerging evidence, case studies, policies, and innovative conceptualizations. We particularly encourage studies that link various disciplines to clarify the nuances of forest-based mitigation measures.
This session will cover the following topics, along with other related subjects:
• Modeling climate and environmental influences on forests and the delivery of different ecosystem services under different mitigation measures
• Unraveling the social, ecological, and economic co-benefits and trade-offs of forest-based mitigation measures
• Insights, tools, and practices enabling the successful implementation of mitigation measures and enhancement of social-ecological systems’ resilience
• Governance or agent-based models to improve the societal and environmental benefits of mitigation measures
• Better understanding of opportunities and limitations of mitigation measures
• The implications of forest-based mitigation measures on enhancing forest resilience against disturbances
• Methods and tools for decision and adaptation support in the forestry, considering multiple stakeholders and multifunctional perspectives
• New development and analysis of forest scenarios

Droughts, characterized by precipitation deficits and high evaporative demand, are becoming increasingly frequent, prolonged, and intense under global environmental change. Climatic drivers (such as altered precipitation regimes and rising temperatures) and land surface modifications (including vegetation greening, deforestation, land-use transitions, and wildfires) interact in complex ways to shape ecohydrological responses to droughts across spatial and temporal scales.
This session invites contributions that explore how ecosystems and hydrological processes respond to droughts (hereafter referred to as drought responses), aiming to uncover both underlying mechanisms and broader consequences. We welcome studies based on observational, modeling, and conceptual approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. New insights into drought responses based on emerging in-situ and satellite observations of soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and vegetation dynamics.
2. Process-based understanding of ecohydrological responses to droughts of varying severity under changing climate and land surface conditions.
3. Long-term trends and resilience of ecohydrological systems under recurrent droughts, with a focus on resistance, recovery, and key environmental drivers.
4. Advances in modeling frameworks (process-based or AI-based) and observation-constrained approaches for improving the representation of drought responses.
5. Social and ecological impacts of evolving droughts, including implications for ecosystems, agriculture, water resources, and human well-being.
By integrating hydrology, ecology, and remote sensing, this session seeks to advance our understanding of ecohydrological drought responses and to inform sustainable adaptation strategies in a changing environment.

Our ability to understand biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus and other elements in aquatic ecosystems as well as biotic evolution and ecosystem functioning has evolved enormously thanks to advancements in in situ sensor measurements, laboratory techniques and predictive models. The aim of this session is to demonstrate how this methodological advancement improves our understanding of coupled hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes in aquatic environments and how it decodes faunal and ecosystem functional responses. In particular, our session focuses on improving the identification and quantification of the sources, delivery pathways, transformations and environmental fate of carbon and organic matter, nutrients, sediments and emerging contaminants in aquatic environments. Additional emphasis will be placed on biogeochemical interactions affecting aquatic organisms. In this multidisciplinary session, we welcome presentations on applications of novel techniques to improve our understanding of aquatic environments, , their biotic evolution, and robust data-driven and modelling approaches for advanced processing of aquatic biogeochemical data. As hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes undergo accelerated change, this session welcomes also studies presenting approaches and tools to monitor, model, and predict water quality and sensitivity of aquatic ecosystems to global change and human disturbance.

Estuaries and other transitional water bodies such as bays, fjords and coastal lagoons are dynamic ecosystems with high biogeochemical turnover rates, acting as critical filters between terrestrial and marine environments. Their sharp biogeochemical gradients and nutrient retention play an important role in shaping ecosystem processes. The combination of high turnover, local hydrographic conditions and human-driven stressors strongly influences the spatio-temporal variability of greenhouse gases (GHG) cycling and sediment-water-air fluxes, ultimately driving changes in the net radiative balance of these coastal systems. Despite similarities in physico-chemical conditions, source/sink dynamics, and microbial communities across other coastal transitional water bodies at different latitudes, responses to environmental perturbations can vary significantly.
This session focuses on recent advances in understanding the biogeochemical cycling, microbial pathways, and fluxes of the major GHG carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) in estuarine and other transitional water bodies systems across all latitudes. Particular focus is set on nutrient and pollutant transport across the land-ocean continuum, submarine groundwater discharge, and benthic-pelagic coupling. Submissions addressing the current and projected responses in GHG cycling and emissions to anthropogenic-driven changes such as deoxygenation, eutrophication and warming (including associated events such as droughts and floods) are encouraged. We welcome contributions spanning laboratory and mesocosm experiments, field observations, remote sensing and modelling approaches.

Our capacity to estimate regional and global budgets of greenhouse gases (GHG, including CO2, CH4 and N2O) from aquatic ecosystems has been significantly improved during the past decade, thanks to the substantial increase in field measurements. However, global estimates of these fluxes remain highly uncertain. Moreover, compared with terrestrial ecosystems, the field of aquatic GHG research is still young and the mechanisms behind the spatiotemporal patterns and variability of GHG concentrations and fluxes in aquatic ecosystems are not sufficiently understood, constraining model development. Therefore, to improve our estimations and understanding of regional and global GHG budgets from aquatic ecosystems, this session welcomes contributions on e.g.:
1) Field observations of GHG dynamics and fluxes in aquatic ecosystems, both freshwater and marine systems.
2) Experiments revealing physicochemical or biological processes or factors of relevance for GHG production, consumption, transport, emission, or uptake.
3) Model development or simulation efforts to estimate GHG dynamics and fluxes across different spatial and temporal scales along the aquatic continuum.
Contributions providing additional perspectives of relevance for aquatic GHG cycling and fluxes are also of interest.

Methane is a potent atmospheric trace gas, largely produced—and also consumed—within sediments and the water column of marine and lacustrine systems. Yet, understanding methane dynamics in the aquatic realm remains a major scientific challenge, shaped by geological, oceanographic/limnological, biological, and anthropogenic factors.

This session invites your contributions on methane in aquatic systems—past, present, and future. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

· Methane formation: from water–rock interactions and petroleum systems to microbial methanogenesis

· Methane transport: from subsurface fluid flow to bubble and diffusive transport mechanisms and fluxes

· Anthropogenic factors: from hydrocarbon exploitation and leaking wells to energy infrastructure and hydraulic structures

· Methane sinks: from microbial processes, biogeochemical pathways and kinetics to physicochemical removal processes

· Timescapes: from ultra-short variations to diel, seasonal, and geological timescales

· Geobiology: from microbe-animal symbioses to the carbon footprint of methane in broader ecological context

· Archives: from methane-derived carbonates and microbe–mineral interactions to molecular and macrofossil records

Blue carbon ecosystems, including mostly salt marshes, mangroves, seagrasses, tidal forests and mudflats, rank among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth. They provide nature-based solutions essential to mitigate residual anthropogenic carbon emissions, while also delivering co-benefits such as biodiversity support or coastal protection. However, their resilience and capacity to sustain these functions are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures. To safeguard their role, it is essential to better understand their carbon cycle—particularly the feedback loops between soil and plants, the exchanges of carbon among the atmosphere, soil, and water, but also how human activities, vegetation, and carbon processes interact.
This session seeks to bring together scientists from multiple disciplines, including biogeochemists, ecologists, geographers, geologists, social scientists, biologists, alongside environmental managers.
By bridging perspectives across the natural and social sciences, the session aims to showcase pioneering research that i) advances understanding processes related to biomass and carbon in blue carbon ecosystems under current and future environmental conditions; and ii) spotlights effective management, conservation, and restoration practices to sustain or enhance carbon sequestration and broader ecosystem services, coupling the ecological functioning with social needs. Through this integration, the session will contribute to the goals of the United Nations Decade for Ocean Sciences, with co-convenorship from the Decade Programme for Blue Carbon in the Global Ocean.

Biogenic habitats such as coral reefs, kelp forests, and seagrass beds, to name a few of the best known, play essential roles for the resilience of marine ecosystems. They act as refuges, feeding grounds, and nurseries for mobile marine species. For humans, they provide protection by attenuating waves, support livelihoods through ecosystem productivity and provide opportunities for recreation through the creation of seascapes. For these reasons, they are the target of long-term protection measures. However, the long-term maintenance of these habitats depends on physical and biological interactions whose effects have yet to be quantified in order to guide effective protection. On one hand, the stability of these habitats over time depends on the successful population renewal of living organisms and therefore the completion of their life cycle. However, most of the species that form these habitats have a life cycle with a dispersive larval phase that allows colonization and expansion of populations but may also hinder local maintenance. On the other hand, the concept of habitat formation for these species is based on environmental changes, primarily transport and physical mixing. An open question remains: what changes to the physical environment can we expect from a population based on its demographic status?
This session invites contributions that describe these two processes essential to the maintenance of biogenic habitats, connectivity and canopy cover, spanning spatial scales from local to the regional. We welcome studies from a variety of marine regions and disciplines, including numerical modelling, experimental studies and field measurements.

Measurements, monitoring and experiments are the basis of hydrological science. However, making these measurements is time-consuming, often financially expensive and not without risk. What do we need to measure, how do we need to measure it and where, to push the boundaries of our science? Where are observational gaps and how do we overcome them? This session aims to celebrate current pioneering work in field hydrology, new promising methods and courageous approaches, and to show the importance of field data for advancing hydrology.

Stable isotopes are powerful tools for tracing water fluxes and associated nutrients in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Because subsurface water and nutrient fluxes, plant water uptake, and atmospheric processes are tightly interconnected, advances in field methods and laboratory techniques are critical for capturing these dynamics and their drivers with greater temporal and spatial resolution, precision, and accuracy. At the same time, ecohydrological models are expanding our ability to integrate these observations and assess fluxes in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. This session welcomes experimental and modeling contributions that apply isotope tracers to advance process-based understanding of water and nutrient fluxes across the subsurface, vegetation, and atmosphere, spanning scales from individual plants and forest stands to catchments. In our session, we aim to discuss i) innovative process-based interpretations of stable isotope data; ii) bridge ecophysiological and hydrological perspectives through field-based approaches; iii) development of novel modeling applications and frameworks or data analysis techniques; and iv) current methodological developments. We aim to foster interdisciplinary exchange among researchers investigating ecohydrological processes with natural tracers, spanning groundwater and vadose zone hydrology, plant physiology, and ecology. By linking those fields through natural tracers, the session will stimulate discussion to deepen our understanding of water and nutrient dynamics across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum.

Wetlands are critical regulators of water, nutrient, and carbon cycles, providing critical ecosystem services such as flood mitigation, nutrient retention, carbon sequestration, groundwater recharge and biodiversity support. How these functions manifest, however, is driven by the broader landscape context in which these wetlands are embedded. This session explores wetlands not only as isolated ecosystems but as part of broader wetlandscapes—networks embedded within agricultural, urban, and natural catchments. We invite contributions spanning field studies, remote sensing, and modeling that assess wetland function, connectivity, and resilience. By bringing together diverse perspectives, this session seeks to advance integrated frameworks for wetland management and policy. Our aim is to spark discussion that bridges the gap between wetland-scale scientific advancements and watershed-scale implementation of nature-based solutions in wetlandscapes.

Global coastal zones are of high ecological and societal values. As the dynamic interface between land, sea, and air, they are heavily impacted by a combination of climate-driven environmental change and human interventions. Approaches to sustainably manage the coastal zone increasingly seek to provide co-benefits of risk mitigation, climate regulation, preserving biodiversity, and supporting coastal community resilience. These require scientific evidence and discourse that integrate across disciplines.

This session invites multi- and inter-disciplinary contributions focusing on coastal processes, their dynamic interactions, and their role in exchanges across coastal interfaces (e.g. land-sea, air-sea, river-sea, …) under a changing climate and changing human activities. We welcome observational, modelling and theoretical studies reporting on processes linked to coastal hydrodynamics, coastal biogeochemistry, coastal ecology, or coastal sediment dynamics and geomorphology. Studies may span the wide range of spatial and temporal scales characteristic of existing and projected change in coastal seascapes and landscapes from the inner shelf shoreward to beaches and dunes, estuaries, intertidal flats, saltmarshes and coastal wetlands. We encourage the submission of holistic Earth system studies that explore the role of the coastal zone for coastal seas’ dynamics including exchanges across coastal under the impact of climate change and human activities. We also encourage studies that focus on impacts of coastal management or coastal adaptation approaches on coastal processes and dynamics, spanning engineered, hybrid, and nature-based options related to changing activities such as coastal protection, tourism, shipping, fisheries and aquaculture, and the expansion of renewable energies and other coastal infrastructure.

Despite advances in our understanding of the Indian Ocean’s physical, biogeochemical, and ecological characteristics and their variability across a range of spatiotemporal scales, significant gaps in our knowledge remain in observing, modeling, and predicting the Indian Ocean’s changing environmental conditions and its role in regional and global climate.
This session invites Indian Ocean contributions based on observations, modelling, theory, and palaeo proxy evidence across a range of timescales from synoptic, interannual, decadal to centennial and beyond. Topics of interest include past, current, and projected changes in Indian Ocean physical and biogeochemical properties and their impacts on ecological processes, diversity in Indian Ocean modes of variability, extent of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, interactions and exchanges between the Indian Ocean and other ocean basins via both oceanic and atmospheric pathways, as well as impacts on regional hydroclimate and adjacent monsoon systems.
Submissions are sought on assessing and predicting weather and climate extremes of societal relevance in the Indian Ocean and surrounding regions. We especially welcome submissions addressing compound extreme events that span across the ocean, atmosphere, and/or biogeochemical and ecological realms. Furthermore, studies evaluating climate risks, vulnerability, resilience, adaptation and mitigation strategies in coastal regions affected, for example, by tropical cyclones and extremes in sea level are encouraged.
We also welcome contributions that address research on the Indian Ocean, using advanced techniques such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, and new technological advances in observing systems, such as deep and biogeochemical Argo.

This session focuses on recent developments and research on ocean data assimilation. Data assimilation is essential for ocean forecasting, reanalysis, and climate studies. By optimally combining numerical simulations with various observations, data assimilation provides a dynamically consistent and comprehensive estimate of the present and past ocean state. This session invites abstract submissions on developments of data assimilation for the physical ocean together with coupled components such as sea ice, marine ecosystems, land-sea interface and atmosphere for ensuring consistency with other parts of the Earth system. The session also focuses on impact of the assimilation and deployment of novel space-borne and in-situ observations such as autonomous platforms, wide-swath satellite tracks, and deep in-situ observations and biogeochemistry profilers.
Beyond state estimation, this session also welcomes contributions in parameter estimation, uncertainty quantification, and hybrid machine learning and data assimilation methods focused on the ocean.

Building and improving existing coastal monitoring capabilities and developing innovative coastal products is vital to coastal protection in the face of climate change. Through new coastal observations (satellite and land-based remote sensing data in addition to in situ observational data), advanced hydrology models, coastal models, and unified coastal management systems, coastal protection and forecasting are improved. With the advances in technological progress, it is possible to also implement new approaches with numerical models and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, enabling pan-European scale methods. This session focuses on advanced, seamless ocean monitoring and forecasting, from global/regional systems to coastal systems, through demonstrations of new products and improved co-produced services. These services aim to provide the marine knowledge needed for coastal applications addressing environmental and social challenges and those enhanced by climate change, such as: pollution hazard/risk mapping, coastal erosion, resource management, harmful algal blooms, and combating ecosystem degradation, supporting Marine Protected Areas, and addressing natural hazards and extreme events.

Climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss increasingly threaten aquifer recharge and groundwater quality. Ecosystem restoration offers multiple pathways to address these challenges by improving soil structure, reducing erosion and pollutant loads, and enhancing infiltration and groundwater replenishment. Restoration measures such as soil amendments, erosion control, river and floodplain rehabilitation, and wetland restoration can improve groundwater safety and resilience to climate extremes, including floods and droughts.
This session invites contributions on the hydrological and water quality impacts of restoration interventions, with emphasis on:
(i) groundwater recharge enhancement under current and future climates,
(ii) effects on chemical and microbiological groundwater quality and safety, including nutrients, trace contaminants, and pathogens,
(iii) biodiversity recovery, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem co-benefits, and
(iv) monitoring and modelling approaches for assessing long-term sustainability and scalability.
We welcome field, laboratory, modelling, and socio-hydrological studies that bridge hydrology with soil science, ecology, water quality, and environmental health, and that explore the role of ecosystems and restoration interventions in supporting sustainable groundwater management under climate change.

The study of water-related ecosystems covers a wide range of applicative contexts, entailing many scientific challenges and several diversified technological solutions.
Nowadays, the sustainable management of water resources requires a holistic approach, which attains to the soil, vegetation and all the living things interacting with the water.
The transition from the mere monitoring of the processes related to water systems to the wider concept of “water habitats”, implies the study of such ecological interactions in various possible scenarios, which are often characterised by a strong relationship between natural and anthropogenic contexts.
In this challenging framework, research activities aimed at developing efficient monitoring technologies and management strategies are encouraged to embrace a highly multidisciplinary approach. Here, water management meets noticeable ecological, economic and social implications, and the public awareness of such implications is rapidly growing.
Accordingly, scientific/technological advancements have to go beyond the observation of water bodies and their related processes and infrastructures, by extending the scope to the water habitats and the many measurable indicators of their functions and health status, directly or indirectly related to water, such as water quality, biodiversity, plant ecophysiology, and resilience to environmental extremes.

This session welcomes contributions related to the monitoring of water systems and their characteristic habitats about:
• design of field measurement instrumentation
• development of new sensing techniques, innovative field experiments
• application of remote sensing products
• advancements in sensor networks
• Integration between sensor systems and computational tasks
• Investigations about data science aspects, e.g. geospatial analyses, big data and AI applications.

Contributions may regard (but are not limited to) rivers & lakes, wetlands, irrigated areas, forests and natural habitats, coastal zone, urban habitats and water infrastructures, including distribution networks. Both qualitative and quantitative assessments are appreciated.
Studies regarding groundwater monitoring and management and its interaction with surface processes are also relevant to this session and are very encouraged.

This session aims to bring together a diverse group of scientists who are interested in how life and planetary processes have co-evolved over geological time, from the Precambrian to the Phanerozoic Eon. This includes studies of how changes in paleoenvironments have influenced the evolution of complex life - including animals, plants, and marine ecosystems - and how, in turn, biological innovations have reshaped Earth system processes. We seek to link fossil records to paleo-Earth processes, highlighting the interplay between biological evolution and tectonic, magmatic, and surface processes and explore how alternating greenhouse-icehouse climates have influenced biodiversity and ecosystem structure.
As an inherently multi-disciplinary subject, we aspire to better understand the complex coupling of biogeochemical cycles and life, the links between mass extinctions and their causal geological events, how fossil records shed light on ecosystem drivers over deep time, and how tectono-geomorphic processes impact biodiversity patterns at global or local scales. We aim to understand our planet and its biosphere through both observation- and modelling-based studies. We also invite contributions on general exoplanet-life co-evolution.

The Precambrian witnessed profound evolutionary and environmental transformations that laid the foundation for life as we know it. Greenstone belts and cratonic cover sequences contain exceptional archives of this history, preserving sedimentary records that reveal conditions at the Earth’s surface, the chemistry of ancient oceans, and potential signatures of early microbial activity, including biomineralization. The Proterozoic fossil record, in particular, provides unique insights into the rise of eukaryotes and the emergence of complex life in the Ediacaran. These archives inform us on key themes such as the redox evolution of transitional oceans, the ecological balance of planktonic versus benthic microorganisms, the shift from Fe-rich to Fe-poor oceans, oxidative stress, and nutrient availability in subaqueous settings.
Recent advances in geochemical techniques underscore the value of interdisciplinary approaches that integrate field observations, experimental geobiology, and high-resolution isotopic analyses. This session welcomes contributions on Precambrian life and surface environments, with an emphasis on the earliest biosignature record. Topics of interest include the origin and diversification of early life, geobiological perspectives on cellular microstructures, oxygenation events, glaciations, biogeochemical cycling, climate, productivity, and the chemistry of ancient oceans.
We particularly encourage submissions employing cutting-edge methods such as high-resolution micro-CT imaging of macro- and microfossils, Raman spectroscopy, FIB-synchrotron analyses, nano-XRF, XANES, SIMS, nano-SIMS, phase propagation contrast tomography, TEM, and ATR-FTIR. We also welcome experimental and Precambrian-analog field studies aimed at biosignature and paleoenvironmental proxy development.

Foraminifera and other eukaryotic microfossil organisms play a crucial role in understanding the biology, ecology, and evolution of marine ecosystems across geological timescales. These organisms serve as key indicators for reconstructing past environments, deciphering ecosystem dynamics, and assessing the impacts of global change on marine systems. This session focuses on the biology and ecology of foraminifera and other microeukaryotes, exploring their functional roles in ecosystems, their responses to environmental changes, and their potential as proxies for past, present, and future ocean conditions.

We welcome contributions that investigate these organisms through diverse approaches, including laboratory experiments, field studies, genetic and molecular analyses, biomineralization studies, isotopic and geochemical techniques, and advanced data analysis methods such as machine learning and modelling. Studies addressing the role of microfossils in biotic evolution, ecosystem functioning, and their responses to natural laboratories (e.g., hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, or areas of rapid environmental change) are particularly encouraged.

By integrating biological, ecological, and geochemical perspectives, this session aims to advance our understanding of how foraminifera and other microfossil organisms respond to environmental variability, contribute to ecosystem processes, and provide insights into the dynamics of Earth’s systems. These insights are essential for reconstructing past ocean conditions, understanding present-day ecosystem functioning, and projecting future changes in marine environments.

Europe's ambitious new nature restoration legislation aims to restore ecosystems to enhance nature conservation, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation efforts. Resilient ecosystems with high biodiversity demonstrate reciprocal relationships between physical processes and biotic components, which act as "ecosystem engineers" and are considered Nature-based Solutions. However, little is known about the presence and environmental functions of ecosystem engineers prior to their eradication or decline in heavily human-modified European landscapes, a knowledge gap that significantly hampers restoration initiatives. Promising new restoration approaches like rewilding or stage 0 approaches will struggle to succeed without a comprehensive understanding of the original, natural state of these ecosystems and their human modification. Here, we aim at collecting studies using e.g. sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) - but also other new and exciting palaeoecological proxies or the modelling of natural processes - as tools for analyzing sediments with the goal to reveal how biota and humans are influencing past ecosystem dynamics and vice versa. We invite studies that reconstruct past ecosystems, their drivers and feedbacks, including the reconstruction of human-modified and natural states, or the co-evolution of physical and biotic-driven processes over a Holocene time-scale. Additionally, we encourage work that considers how these studies can support practitioners to enable the implementation of Europe's largest natural restoration scheme.

The geological record provides insight into how climate processes operate and evolve in response to different than modern boundary conditions and forcings. Understanding deep-time climate evolution is paramount to progressing on understanding fundamental questions of Earth System feedbacks and sensitivity to perturbations, such as the behaviour of the climate system and carbon cycle under elevated atmospheric CO2 levels—relative to the Quaternary—, or the existence of climatic tipping points and thresholds. In recent years, geochemical techniques and Earth System Models complexity have been greatly improved and several international projects on deep-time climates (DeepMIP, MioMIP, PlioMIP) have been initiated, helping to bridge the gap between palaeoclimate modelling and data communities. This session invites work on deep-time climate, Earth System model simulations and proxy-based reconstructions from the Cambrian to the Pliocene. We especially encourage submissions featuring palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, palaeoclimate and carbon cycle modelling, and the integration of CO2 and (hydro)climate proxies and models of any complexity.

Fire, once a vital tool for early human survival and landscape management, has become one of today’s most significant natural hazards, especially in fire-prone regions. With climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires, understanding the long-term relationship between humans and fire is more critical than ever. This session explores cultural pyroscapes: landscapes shaped by the interactions between societies and fire over time. We invite transdisciplinary contributions that use palaeoecological, archaeological, and environmental records to investigate past fire regimes and human responses. Relevant approaches include charcoal and pollen analysis, biochemical proxies, and palaeodemographic data. We particularly welcome studies on Indigenous cultural burning and traditional fire practices that contributed to historical and pre-historical fuel management. Contributions led by or co-designed with Indigenous communities are also encouraged. By highlighting methodological innovations and theoretical advances, this session aims to deepen our understanding of past fire stewardship and its relevance for developing sustainable wildfire mitigation and landscape resilience strategies today.

Speleothems are key terrestrial archives of regional to global palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental changes on sub-seasonal to orbital timescales. They provide high temporally resolved records which can be accurately and precisely dated using a variety of proxies, such as stable O and C isotopes and trace elements. Recent efforts have seen the rise in more non-traditional proxies such as fluid inclusion water isotopes, organic biomarkers, pollen, dead carbon fraction etc. This advancement towards quantitative reconstructions of past precipitation, temperature, or other environmental variables and climate patterns are key variables for data-model comparisons and evaluation. Beyond this, caves and karst areas additionally host an enormous suite of valuable proxy archives such as cave ice, cryogenic carbonates, clastic sediments, tufa, or travertine sequences, which complement the terrestrial palaeorecord, and are often associated with important fossils, historical or archaeological findings.

This session aims to integrate recent developments in the field and invites submissions from a broad range of cave- and karst-related studies from orbital to sub-seasonal timescales.
In particular we welcome contributions from:
(1) (quantitative) reconstructions of past climatic and environmental variables to reconstruct precipitation, vegetation, fire frequency, temperature etc. across different climate zones,
(2) field- and lab-based developments of process-based methods to improve our application of proxy variables,
(3) process and proxy-system model studies as well as integrated research developing and using databases such as SISAL (Speleothem Isotope Synthesis and AnaLysis).

We further welcome advancements in related and/or interdisciplinary areas, which pave the way towards robust (quantitative) interpretations of proxy time series, improve the understanding of proxy-relevant processes, or enable regional-to-global and seasonal-to-orbital scale analyses of the relationships between proxies and environmental parameters. In addition, research contributing to current international co-ordinated activities, such as the PAGES working group on Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis and AnaLysis (SISAL) and others are welcome.

Stable and radiogenic isotopic records have been successfully used for investigating various terrestrial and marine sequences in term of special events including geological boundaries, fossils, evaporative rocks, palaeosols, lacustrine, loess, caves, peatlands. The session includes contributions using isotopes along with sedimentological, biological, paleontological, mineralogical, chemical records in order to unravel past and present climate and environmental changes or as tracers for determining the source of phases involved. Directions using triple isotopes, clumped isotopes, biomarkers and non-traditional stable isotopes are welcomed.
The session invites contributions presenting an applied as well as a theoretical approach. We welcome papers related to reconstructions (at various time and space scales), fractionation factors, measurement methods, proxy calibration, and verification.

Tropical and subtropical South America hosts the richest terrestrial biodiversity on Earth, and plays a pivotal role in global hydrological and carbon cycles. However, these exceptional environments face mounting threats. As an example, the Amazon rainforest, identified as a core tipping element of the climate system, may be pushed towards irreversible degradation by anthropogenic climate change and land-use pressures, further exacerbating the regional precipitation decline. Forestalling and preparing for such future changes require a comprehensive understanding of the past natural climate and vegetation dynamics in (sub)tropical South America, and of their controlling oceanic and atmospheric drivers.
This session explores the latest research results aimed at understanding the variability of tropical and subtropical South American climate and vegetation across Quaternary timescales (from glacial-interglacial, orbital, to millennial and multidecadal timescales), and the land-atmosphere-ocean interactions that control these changes. We welcome works exploring these interactions from high-resolution paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic reconstructions in (sub)tropical South American terrestrial archives (e.g. sediments, speleothems), and marine archives (e.g. sediments, corals) from the adjacent Atlantic and Pacific margins. We also invite contributions investigating Quaternary (sub)tropical South American climate and related land-ocean-atmosphere interactions based on paleoclimate modelling efforts and/or model-data comparisons.

Different palaeoecological disciplines have collected relevant, site-specific data during the last decades. Much of the palaeoecological data are currently dispersed across different repositories, databases and largely not publicly available. COST action CA23116 - Open Palaeoecological Data (PalaeOpen) aims to meet the challenge of bringing much of these data into the public domain, harmonise their taxonomy and metadata, and make them relevant to nature conservation. By combining domain specific repositories and databases, this action will unlock these data collections and make them available for palaeoecological meta-analysis of ecosystem interactions on a continental scale. This will permit integrated analysis of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem responses to natural and anthropogenic environmental change. This session focuses on terrestrial and aquatic environments, data storage and management, and outreach and education. We welcome all types of proxy data studies, single proxy as well as interdisciplinary data from biological, physical and (bio)chemical proxy data communities.

Climate change has long shaped the distribution, adaptation, and extinction of terrestrial life. Past climate variability drove large-scale migrations, evolutionary innovations, and ecosystem restructuring, while modern human activities have added unprecedented pressures to biodiversity and habitats. Understanding the intricate connection between climate and life is essential for monitoring the ongoing biodiversity crisis and developing effective future conservation strategies.

This session explores how climate influences terrestrial life and ecosystems across timescales – from deep-time events to present, and the future challenges. We welcome multidisciplinary studies that integrate paleoecology, ecology, climate science, evolutionary biology, and conservation. Topics of interest include,

- Extinctions: drivers and ecological impacts
- Biodiversity shifts and emerging trends
- Vegetation and biome dynamics
- Climate- and human-induced habitat degradation
- Adaptation strategies of species and ecosystems
- Insights from advanced observations and climate-ecosystem models

By bridging past, present, and future perspective, this session aims to forge collaborations and cross-disciplinary dialogue on climate–life interactions.

Accurate reconstructions of sea surface, bottom water, and continental surface temperatures during the Cenozoic era are essential for understanding climate dynamics in the geological past, particularly under warmer-than-present conditions. However, producing robust and precise paleotemperature estimates remains inherently challenging. Temperature proxies are subject to a range of geochemical, biological, environmental, and analytical uncertainties, which lead to discrepancies in both absolute and relative temperature estimates across different methods. These limitations hinder efforts to synthesize globally representative paleotemperature records and to constrain the rates and magnitudes of global temperature changes in response to both abrupt and long-term changes in atmospheric CO₂.

Addressing these challenges requires new approaches, including improved proxy calibrations, and more comprehensive inter-proxy and proxy-model comparisons, to obtain a better understanding of the uncertainties associated with paleotemperature reconstructions. In this session, we welcome contributions that push the boundaries of Cenozoic paleotemperature research, including new multi-proxy and multi-site temperature reconstructions, new advances in proxy ground-truthing, applications, and calibrations, and novel modelling perspectives on paleotemperature changes. By bringing together the diverse community using proxy and modelling techniques, we seek to increase the robustness of Cenozoic ocean and terrestrial temperature reconstructions. Ultimately, this will improve our understanding of Earth’s climate system and its behaviour during warmer-than-present states.

Environmental changes and the geodynamic evolution of continents have facilitated both the emergence of life on Earth and the diversification of mineral species from the early Archean until today. However, the physico-chemical conditions of ancient environments remain poorly understood, particularly regarding the processes and consequences of major oxygenation events (e.g., the Great Oxidation Event, Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event, and Phanerozoic Oceanic Anoxic Events) and associated mass extinctions, as well as the influence of continents and mantle processes in modulating ocean chemistry at different times in Earth’s history.
Understanding key processes shaping modern and ancient environments; such as weathering, hydrothermal alteration of the oceanic crust, bacterial activity, sedimentation, and diagenesis; is crucial for reconstructing paleo-environments. Redox processes and Earth’s oxygenation during critical transitions and biotic crises are central to unraveling the links between environmental change and biological evolution.
With this session, we encourage contributions from the interdisciplinary fields of geochemistry, oceanography, sedimentology, mineralogy, and geo(micro)biology with a particular emphasis on geochemical and isotope-based approaches to redox reconstructions, element cycling, and paleoenvironmental modeling. We welcome studies addressing the evolution of early life habitats, biomineralization, and paleobiological responses during intervals of profound environmental and climatic change, highlighting the links between Earth's chemical evolution and life.

Micropaleontological data provide unique insights into the dynamics and tipping points of past environments and climate through changes in the fossil record, such as assemblage composition, morphology, and evolutionary patterns. Micropaleontology lies at the heart of biostratigraphy and provides a fundamental tool for reconstructing and stratigraphically constraining past changes in the Earth system. Our session aims to gather a broad spectrum of micropaleontologists to showcase recent advances in applying micropaleontological data in paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatological, and stratigraphic research in both marine and terrestrial settings.
We invite contributions from the field of micropaleontology that focus on the development and application of microfossils (including, but not limited to, coccolithophores, diatoms, dinoflagellates, foraminifera, ostracods, radiolarians, and pollen) as proxies for paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatological reconstructions and tools for stratigraphic correlation. We particularly encourage the submission of multi-proxy approaches, merging micropaleontological information with geochemical and paleobiological information. The application of microfossils as stratigraphic markers and advancing multivariate statistical techniques with a focus on microfossil assemblages is encouraged.

Now in its third year, Eco-Omics highlights the growing frontier of linking omics with Earth system science. We focus on advancing understanding across the Biosphere, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Cryosphere, and Geosphere by combining molecular-level insights with environmental observations. Omics technologies are revealing how organisms and communities function, adapt, and interact, while Earth system science provides long-term monitoring, flux networks, remote sensing, and experimental platforms that capture environmental change across spatial and temporal scales. Together, these approaches open new opportunities to uncover the mechanisms and feedbacks that shape ecosystem resilience and Earth system dynamics.
We invite contributions that integrate omics datasets (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, spectranomics, ionomics, elementomics, isotopomics) with Earth observations, experimental networks, trait data, or paleo records. We particularly welcome studies that use dedicated experiments at local, regional, or global scales, as well as long-term surveys, monitoring programs, or Earth system models, to connect molecular and ecological processes with large-scale patterns.
By bringing together scientists across disciplines, this session continues to build a community working at the interface of biology, ecology, and geoscience—where Omics and Earth system science converge to transform our understanding of a changing planet.

Are you curious about how environmental DNA (eDNA) would benefit your geoscience research and how to get started? This hands-on course offers a practical roadmap for designing and executing successful eDNA experiments in the geosciences.
We'll walk you through every step — from choosing the right sampling strategies, to understanding lab protocols and commercial kits, technical replication (and why they matter), and essential controls. You'll also explore the pros and cons of different sequencing platforms, helping you select the best tools for your research goals.
By the end, you'll be fully equipped to plan your own eDNA survey. Whether you're just starting out or refining your approach, this course provides the practical insights you need to succeed.

Soil health is the capacity of soil to function as an ecosystem, providing means to sustain productivity and maintain environmental quality. In the EU alone, 60% of the soils are degraded due to both global change factors (warming, extreme weather events, elevated CO2 levels, droughts, floods, etc.) and human activity (intensive agriculture, land-use change, industrial processes, etc.). Initial modifications of the physical and chemical soil properties, can have dramatic effects on soil biota, which is an important driver of ecosystem services.
We invite contributions from field, laboratory and modeling studies focused on biological soil health descriptors or indicators, such as microbial respiration, enzyme activities, diversity and functions of soil (micro)organisms and other parameters affected by global change and human activities. This session welcomes contributions on soil health assessment methods, with a focus on biological soil fertility and the ecosystem services provided by soils. We particularly encourage abstracts that explore soil health across temporal and spatial scales, from micro-level to global perspectives.
Confirmed invited speaker - Dr. Panos Panagos, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy

Global change—including climate warming, altered precipitation, land-use intensification, and changing nutrient inputs—is reshaping ecosystems worldwide, with profound consequences for soil carbon and nutrient cycling. Microbial communities are the key engines of these cycles, ultimately determining whether soils act as carbon sinks or sources under future conditions. Building a better understanding of how microbial communities, activity and physiology respond to diverse aspects of Global change is crucial to predict biogeochemical processes across temporal and spatial scales.

This session highlights research that integrates microbial physiology and diversity into our understanding of soil biogeochemistry under global change. Contributions range from controlled studies with microbial isolates to ecosystem-level assessments across diverse climates, employing flux quantification techniques and advanced approaches such as omics, isotope tracing, microscopy, and spectroscopy. We feature empirical and theoretical studies addressing soil microbial resistance, resilience, and adaptation to single and multi-factorial climatic disturbances, as well as research on the interactions between soil microorganisms, plants and fauna. Join us to exchange ideas, share new findings, and discuss how linking soil microbes to ecosystem processes can improve our predictions of ecological responses in a rapidly changing world.

Microorganisms are regarded as central drivers of carbon and nutrient cycling in soil. Still, the integration of microbial functions into biogeochemical processes often relies on simplified assumptions of cell physiology, with little insights into actual growth dynamics and interactions among microbial groups. Exploring microbial physiology in the heterogeneous soil system is methodologically challenging. Developing fields of –omics, microscopy, spectroscopy or isotope labeling allow direct analyses of microbial activity in soil, while the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge from microbiological studies of the organisms itself adds important new perspectives. Such detailed understanding of microbial communities is crucial to understand biogeochemical processes across temporal and spatial scales.
In this session we invite research exploring microbial growth, turnover and activity from individuals to complex communities with a focus on their impact on biogeochemical processes in soil. Contributions may provide a broad overview on latest developments in the field of soil microbial ecology, ranging from studies under controlled conditions with microbial isolates to analyses in soil using advanced analytical tools. We welcome studies working with whole soil microbial communities as well as those with a focus on chosen microbial groups. Highlighting understudied microbial groups like fungi and protists is highly appreciated, as well as trophic interactions with mesofauna or viruses. Biogeochemical processes may cover the whole field, including classical studies of litter decomposition, nutrient dynamics and ecological stoichiometry, carbon cycling via microbial residues (necromass, EPS..) or methane and nitrous oxide production.

Session description
This session aims to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives on the interplay between microbial activity, sedimentary processes, and geochemical signatures in lacustrine and marine environments, both modern and ancient. We seek contributions that explore how microbial metabolisms influence mineral formation (e.g., carbonates, clays, sulphates), how isotopic and molecular biosignatures record biogeochemical processes, and how sedimentary archives can be interpreted to reconstruct past environmental and climatic conditions.
We particularly encourage submissions that combine natural systems with experimental analogues, including laboratory simulations of mineral precipitation, microbe–mineral interactions, and environmental gradients. Studies integrating field observations, experimental data, and cutting-edge analytical or computational approaches (e.g., spectroscopy, synchrotron techniques, geochemistry, stable isotopes, machine learning) are especially welcome.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Microbially mediated mineral precipitation in lacustrine and marine systems
• Early diagenesis and biosignature formation: field, lab, and model approaches
• Stable isotope systems as proxies for microbial and environmental processes
• Experimental analogues simulating early Earth, Mars-like, or extreme environments
• Sedimentary and geochemical archives for paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental reconstructions
• Integration of microbial ecology, mineralogy, and geochemistry to assess biogeochemical feedbacks
• Applications to the search for early life and biosignatures in the geological record and planetary contexts

Minerals are formed in great diversity under Earth surface conditions, as skeletons, microbialites, speleothems, or authigenic cements, and they preserve a wealth of geochemical, biological, mineralogical, and isotopic information, providing valuable archives of past environmental conditions. Interpretion of these archives requires fundamental understanding of fluid-rock interaction processes, but also insights from the geological record.

In this session we welcome oral and poster presentations from a wide range of research of topics, including process-oriented studies in modern systems, the ancient rock record, experiments, computer simulations, and high-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy techniques. We intend to reach a wide community of researchers sharing the common goal of improving our understanding of the fundamental processes underlying mineral formation, which is essential to read our Earth’s geological archive.

This session explores the interactions between Earth’s magnetic field and life, from the origin, evolution and mechanisms of magnetoreception to broader impacts of geomagnetic field on ecosystems and planetary habitability. It seeks to integrate perspectives from earth sciences, biology, environmental sciences, and biomedical applications.
The geomagnetic field is a fundamental component of Earth’s system, shielding the biosphere from solar and cosmic radiation, modulating atmospheric processes, and influencing evolutionary pathways. Its temporal and spatial variability throughout Earth's history may have profoundly shaped the Earth’s habitability and the biosphere. Understanding these linkages is crucial not only for reconstructing past Earth systems but also for assessing planetary habitability beyond Earth.
We welcome contributions on: (i) the behavior and dynamics of Earth’s ancient and present magnetic field and its environmental consequences, including changes in radiation, atmospheric chemistry, and climate; (ii) the influence of Earth’s magnetic field on prebiotic chemistry and the origin of life; (iii) biological responses to magnetic fields in microorganisms, animals and ecosystems, including potential roles in Phanerozoic mass extinctions and evolutionary radiations; (iv) methodological and theoretical advances in magnetic measurements, with emphasis on innovations for detecting weak magnetic signals and biominerals; and (v) applications of biogenic magnetic nanoparticles in Earth science and beyond.
This session will bring together researchers from earth sciences, biology, environmental sciences, and planetary science to exchange ideas and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. It will provide a platform to strengthen biogeomagnetism research and to explore its implications for planetary habitability.

Impacts are likely to have played a significant role in the emergence and evolution of life. The influence of impacts on life are manifold. Firstly, impacts by asteroids, comets and meteorites might have delivered water and other vital molecules for the early evolution of life to Earth. Secondly, impacts have in the past caused mass extinction at least once, namely in the case of the End Cretaceous impact, thereby greatly influencing the evolution of life on Earth. Heavy bombardment of impacts during the Hadean age of Earth might also have delayed or repeatedly frustrated the origin of life on Earth. Impact by large bodies still pose a non-negligible threat to terrestrial life. Eve smaller impacts can have considerable ecological implications. Thirdly, impacts might have created local favourable conditions for life, especially through the creation of impact-generated hydrothermal vents, which could have persisted for a long time after the initial impact. Thus, impacts can have both a negative and positive influence on life.
On a less dramatic note, impacts and impact sites are ideal vectors to get the public interested in geology and space sciences. Many geoparks have been created around impact craters and have been used to foster public engagement in science. Amongst other themes, the proposed session will especially invite contributions concerning the following subjects:
• Impacts and the early history of the Solar System
• Impact structures as indicators of target properties and habitability
• Role of impacts in delivery and formation of the molecular building blocks for life
• Impact-generated habitats for life
• Environmental and ecological effects of impacts
• Impacts as threats for life and humankind
• Use of impact sites for geoconservation, education and outreach

Surface processes continually reshape the environments that life depends on, with consequences that both sustain and disrupt ecosystems and societies. Weathering supplies nutrients and contributes to soil formation, while fluvial, glacial, and eolian erosion redistribute sediments and expose new surfaces, creating and sustaining habitats for microbial, plant, and animal communities. At the same time, long-term gradual changes such as soil erosion, sediment accumulation, slope instability, and coastal retreat can bring disruptive changes. These often overlooked “silent disasters” rarely make it into risk frameworks that tend to focus on catastrophic events, yet their cascading impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, and human societies can be profound.
This session invites contributions that explore both the sustaining and disruptive roles of surface processes, with particular emphasis on how long-term, large-scale geomorphic processes ripple into living systems. We welcome case studies, modeling, and conceptual work from geomorphology, ecology, hazard science, and sustainability that examine how these processes ripple through living systems. By highlighting both their constructive and disruptive impacts, the session aims to demonstrate the central role of surface processes in shaping the resilience and adaptive capacity of ecosystems and societies.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent, with climate-related hazards such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires becoming more frequent and intense. These events not only pose direct threats to human systems but also trigger cascading effects across ecosystems, biodiversity, and biogeochemical cycles. This panel discussion explores the complex interplay between climate change and compounding natural hazards—such as wildfires, landslides, and extreme weather—and their cascading impacts on ecological systems, biogeochemical processes, and carbon dynamics. It will examine how these interactions affect ecosystem services, resilience and adaptation, drawing on insights from ecological modelling, Earth observation, and multi-risk analysis.

To effectively address these complex and cascading risks, the session also draws on expertise in governance and science-policy communication, recognising that scientific insights must be translated into actionable strategies, informed decision-making, and inclusive policies that enhance societal and ecological resilience.

This session brings together experts in ecological modelling, Earth Observation, multi-risk assessment, governance, and science-policy communication, including members of the EGU Climate Hazards Task Force. Panellists will respond to questions from the chairs and the audience, addressing how scientific research can better inform policy, what tools are needed to anticipate complex hazard-ecosystem interactions, and how to foster resilience in the face of uncertainty. The session aims to bridge disciplinary boundaries and spark dialogue between scientists, policymakers, and civil society, encouraging a shift from reactive to proactive risk and ecosystem management.

Warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions (WIE) are a blind spot in climate science and climate policy and affect estimates of the remaining carbon budget inferred by the Transient Climate Response to Cumulative Emissions (TCRE), assumptions related to Earth system stability and the Zero-Emissions Commitment (ZEC), and will also require additional mitigation efforts to maintain a safe climate. This session invites scientists using experimental, observational, and modeling techniques to understand greenhouse-gas climate feedbacks from permafrost, wetlands, wildfires, vegetation and soils, and coastal and marine ecosystems to reduce uncertainties and better inform climate policy and mitigation. The session aims to explore linkages between warming-induced emissions and policy and mitigation activities related to maintaining climate stability and recovery.

Distributed continental and global scale research infrastructures have fundamentally changed the environmental and ecological research landscape. The so formed scientific networks institutionalize collaborations within and across science disciplines and between data
collectors, distributors and users. The temporal scope of this collaboration is unlimited, but sustainability of support must be earned by the relevance of the outcomes from various stakeholder perspectives. Active involvement of different partners poses a communication
challenge, and this session offers a platform for communication between different groups of scientists and stakeholders with an interest in these research infrastructures.

We welcome contributions that - present new developments and discussions within the long-term flux and ecosystem infrastructure community, - demonstrate unique and novel results that were made possible from the unique supports from the research networks, and - describe and assess the relevance of outputs from these research networks for stakeholders and the society in general.

In this session, we aim at cultivating a scientific and personal dialogue between the heterogeneous parts of this growing scientific community. We invite participants, users and stakeholders of the networks to contribute to this dialogue and learn from other perspectives and experiences for the benefits of further developing this new and growing culture of scientific collaboration.

While the initiative originates from within the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS), we particularly welcome contributions from other networks that relate their work to biogeochemistry research.

Direct flux measurements of heat, water, greenhouse gasses (GHGs) and pollutants between the earth’s surface and its atmosphere unlock fair and equitable climate solutions across natural and built environments. Innovations and markets based on such an approach help resolve global climate and air quality challenges and fairly reward small and big stakeholders.

This session, organized collaboratively by research and industry, welcomes ideas and examples of how to utilize direct flux measurements for tangible societal benefits, such as carbon removal, agriculture and forestry, reduction of anthropogenic emissions, environmental impact management, and more. For instance, these measurements can be applied to irrigation scheduling, soil and plant treatments, GHG reduction and sequestration, global warming potential, urban heat management, satellite and model products, industry emissions, severe weather impacts, air quality management, and can be used as a diagnostic tool for meeting net-zero targets by different organizations, regulatory, and government agencies.

Join us to discuss together developing a global paradigm for maximum-integrity, low-latency and economically sound earth stewardship, anchored in direct flux measurements.

European forests are facing unprecedented challenges. While they provide critically important ecosystem services such as carbon storage, clean air, local cooling, or maintaining biodiversity, their resilience is increasingly put under pressure by intensifying disturbances. Their carbon sink strength and storage capacity are apparently weakening in Europe, and their management, when optimized to mitigate climate change, might conflict with biodiversity protection, or vice versa. Thus, identifying pathways for sustainable forestry is a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor task, and is central for the European Green Deal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health strategy and also at the heart of the EU Horizon 2020 CLIMB-FOREST (2022-2027) project ( https://www.climbforest.eu/ ).
In this session, we will explore how to design and implement climate- and biodiversity-smart forestry, aiming for long-term sustainability and multifunctionality. We are interested in contributions that address forest ecosystem services in an integrated manner, including:
- management history
- biomass production, carbon gains and losses
- impacts of major disturbances and extreme events
- biogeochemical and biophysical properties of forest stands
- past climate change and future climate projections for forests
- interactions with atmospheric chemistry, e.g. aerosols and BVOC production
- bioeconomic aspects and wood production
- scenarios for alternative future forest management
Taking a broad approach, we particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches and insights from forest ecology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, biogeochemistry, biophysics, socio-economic modeling, policy analyses, and beyond. Join us to share your research and engage in dialogue on how to reconcile climate mitigation, biodiversity, and resilience in forests.

Since 196 Parties to the Paris Agreement committed to limiting global warming to well below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels, achieving these goals requires dramatically accelerated action. The latest UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2024 shows that nations must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035. At regional scales, coastal areas face dual challenges of contributing to climate mitigation while adapting to climate impacts including sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and changing precipitation patterns.
Coastal forests, including mangroves, coastal shrublands, and terrestrial forest systems, represent critical nature-based solutions that simultaneously address climate adaptation and mitigation at regional scales. These ecosystems provide essential adaptation services through coastal protection from storm surges, erosion control, flood mitigation, and habitat connectivity for climate-resilient biodiversity corridors. Simultaneously, they deliver significant mitigation benefits through carbon sequestration in vegetation and soils, with mangroves storing up to 1,000 tC ha-1.
Regional variations in climate vulnerability, ecosystem composition, and management capacity create unique opportunities for implementing coastal forest-based climate solutions. Mangrove forests at the land-sea interface provide storm protection and exceptional carbon storage through complex soil-vegetation-water interactions driven by tidal processes, salinity gradients, and sediment dynamics. Coastal shrublands and terrestrial forests contribute through slope stabilization, watershed protection, and terrestrial carbon sequestration while supporting climate adaptation through micro-climate regulation.
Understanding regional-specific approaches to coastal forest management is essential for optimizing both adaptation and mitigation outcomes. This session welcomes interdisciplinary studies on: (1) regional climate adaptation through coastal forests; (2) carbon sequestration and mitigation potential; (3) regional management and governance strategies; and (4) integrated monitoring and co-benefits assessment.

Water quality is a critical environmental and societal challenge posing urgent challenges for ecosystems, human health and sustainable development. Anthropogenic drivers such as agricultural intensification, urbanisation, industrial activity and climate change are intensifying pressures on aquatic systems, leading to nutrient enrichment and eutrophication, sediment and contaminant loading, and emerging pollutants. Conventional management approaches are often inadequate, prompting growing recognition of the potential of innovative methods and nature-based solutions to deliver cost-effective, resilient and multifunctional alternatives.
This session provides a platform for research that advances the concepts, design, implementation, and evaluation of solutions to water quality challenges. We welcome contributions on nature-based interventions, integrated catchment management and restoration projects, alongside novel approaches leveraging new technology, modelling and data-driven decision support. Interdisciplinary case studies and work that considers the policy, governance, and community dimensions of implementing these solutions and mainstreaming nature-based solutions are particularly welcome. By bringing together science, practice and policy, the session aims to identify pathways towards more sustainable and inclusive water quality management.

Urban areas are increasingly facing dual challenges of thermal discomfort and flooding, both aggravated by anthropogenic climate change. Addressing these hazards requires integrative computational modelling and machine learning frameworks that can assess, predict, and optimize the role of green adaptation strategies.
This session invites contributions that investigate how urban greening, from large-scale green infrastructure to fine-scale vegetation attributes such as species density and leaf morphology, can mitigate urban heat island intensity and thermal stress. We also welcome studies demonstrating how green infrastructure reduces flood impacts by attenuating flood peaks, enhancing infiltration, and protecting built environments.
We particularly encourage approaches that integrate urban climatology, hydrology, ecology, and data science, including:
Modelling of heat-flood interactions under varying green adaptation scenarios.
Machine learning and computational methods for hazard prediction and resilience assessment.
Modelling urban vegetation impacts on microclimate, runoff reduction, and biodiversity.
Urban heat island analyses and strategies for mitigation through green design.
Comparative studies across climate zones, cities, or adaptation typologies.
By bridging climate adaptation science with computational innovation, this session will highlight how nature-based solutions can build climate-resilient cities under global change.

The urgency, complexity, and economic implications of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions demand strategic investments in science-based information for planning, implementing, and tracking emission reduction policies and actions. An increasing number of applications succeed by combining activity-based emissions data with atmospheric GHG measurements and analyses – this hybrid approach can yield additional insights and practical information to support mitigation efforts at different scales. Inspired by this potential, the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System (IG3IS) of the World Meteorological Organization works to identify and document good practice guidelines for informing decisions, while promoting scientific advances and facilitating two-way linkages between practitioners and stakeholders in the policy realm, tailoring research actions to meet policy needs.
Since EGU18, this session continues to showcase how scientific data and analyses can be transformed into actionable information services and successful climate solutions for a wide range of user-communities. Actionable information results from data with the required spatial and temporal granularity and compositional details able to explicitly target, attribute and track GHG emissions and reductions where climate action is achievable.
This session seeks contributions from researchers, inventory compilers, government decision and policy makers, non-government and private sector service providers that show the use and impact of science-based methods for detecting, quantifying, tracking GHG emissions and the resulting climate mitigation. We especially welcome presentations of work guided by IG3IS good practice research guidelines at urban and national scale and for specific economic sectors. The scope of the session spans measurements of all GHGs and from all tiers of observation.

Achieving the climate goals of the Paris Agreement requires deep greenhouse gas emissions reductions towards a net-zero world. Advancements in mitigation-relevant science continuously inform the strategies and measures that society pursues to achieve this goal. This session aims to further our understanding of the science surrounding the achievement of net-zero emissions and the Paris Agreement mitigation goal with particular interest in remaining carbon budgets, emission pathways entailing net-zero targets, carbon dioxide removal strategies, overshoot and reversibility, the theoretical underpinnings of these concepts, and their policy implications.

We welcome studies exploring all aspects of climate change in response to ambitious mitigation scenarios, including climate overshoot through scenarios that pursue net negative emissions and a reversal of global warming. In addition to studies exploring the remaining carbon budget and the transient climate response to cumulative emissions of CO2 (TCRE), we welcome contributions on the zero emissions commitment (ZEC), effects of different forcings and feedbacks (e.g. permafrost carbon feedback), non-CO2 contributions to stringent climate change mitigation (e.g. non-CO2 greenhouse gases, and aerosols), and climate and carbon-cycle effects of carbon removal strategies, including their implications for policy.

We invite contributions that use a variety of tools, including fully coupled Earth System Models (ESMs), Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), or Simple Climate Models (SCMs) and climate emulators. Interdisciplinary contributions from the fields of climate policy and economics focused on applications of carbon budgets, net-zero pathways, and their wider implications are also encouraged.

Peatlands play a significant role in regulating the Earth’s climate system, storing around 30% of global soil organic carbon. Carbon release due to peatland drainage and degradation contributes around 4% to global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Peatlands are involved in provisioning many important ecosystem services at the landscape scale such as regulating hydrology, increasing biodiversity and providing cultural services. Conversely, degraded peatlands are a significant source of GHG and can alter hydrology and water quality, lead to biodiversity loss and increase risks from fire. As many of their impacts become more pronounced at the landscape scale, inventories for biodiversity, land use and GHG accounting require information at the national scale.

Many peatland areas in Europe are subject to conflicts of interest regarding land use. Robust policies are therefore required to accurately assess the regional and national consequences of peatland policies. These policies should be informed by accurate inventories that provide information about the status of peatland and the vulnerability of the carbon store. National mapping efforts are often varied in completeness and depth and are often based on historical categories and information. Harmonisation is increasingly required to enable benchmarking and compatibility with international standards and reporting.

This session welcomes contributions on peatland systems globally that address aspects of 1) GHG accounting, 2) monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) schemes, 3) mapping of peatland conditions, 4) regional and international standards for voluntary carbon markets, and 5) economic and social aspects of peatland rewetting/restoration. We appreciate studies on methodological development, field measurements, remote sensing, hydrological modelling, as well as interdisciplinary studies.

Life on Earth depends on a thin and dynamic layer at the interface of atmosphere, vegetation, soil, and water. Within this complex system, remote sensing (RS) provides unique insights by capturing signals generated through the interaction of incoming, reflected, and emitted electromagnetic (EM) radiation with these surfaces. Vegetation, soil, and water play a critical role as mediators between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere, and their properties can be observed through optical, thermal, and microwave remote sensing, including fluorescence signals across the EM spectrum.

This session invites contributions that advance our understanding of the biosphere through strategies, methods, and applications of remote sensing. We welcome studies on:
• Integrating RS data across spectral regions, angular configurations, and fluorescence signals
• Combining RS with in-situ measurements for modelling carbon, water and nutrients cycles
• Applications in climate change mitigation and adaptation, food production and security, sustainable development, land and nature conservation and protection, biodiversity, epidemiology, and public health (e.g., pollen-related impacts)
• Air pollution from both natural and anthropogenic sources (e.g., fires emissions, GHG emissions form land-sector, VOCs)
• Data assimilation of RS and in-situ observations in bio-geophysical, land surface models and atmospheric models
• Innovative RS signal extraction and processing techniques

We encourage submissions showcasing novel approaches, interdisciplinary applications, and case studies that highlight the growing potential of remote sensing for addressing urgent environmental and societal challenges.

Geostationary satellites such as MSG, GOES, and Himawari are transforming our ability to observe land systems with high temporal resolution. By capturing the diurnal dynamics of vegetation, surface temperature, clouds, and land–atmosphere exchanges, they open new opportunities for understanding processes that evolve over hours rather than days or weeks. Such observations enable applications ranging from monitoring phenology and heat fluxes to detecting rapid ecosystem disturbances and stress. This capability is crucial for developing a more nuanced understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems function on sub-daily timescales.
This session invites contributions that exploit the unique capabilities of geostationary remote sensing for biogeoscience applications. We particularly welcome studies on diurnal cycles, vegetation dynamics and land–atmosphere interactions, as well as methodological advances such as data fusion and novel processing pipelines.

Quantifying and valuing biodiversity is essential for effective conservation strategies and addressing and mitigating biodiversity loss. Remote sensing is increasingly recognized as a valuable tool for monitoring various aspects of plant diversity, offering a solution to the spatial and temporal limitations of traditional field sampling. In addition, remote sensing can provide colocated information regarding ecosystem functions and services, which is crucial for understanding the role of plant diversity in maintaining ecosystem stability and resilience.
Despite its potential, remote sensing still faces numerous challenges in reliably quantifying plant diversity and bridging the gap with the field of ecology. There is a need for suitable and comparable field datasets that represent terrestrial ecosystems that support the development of remote sensing reliable estimation methods and modeling frameworks, and leverage opportunities from new remote sensing missions and their integration. At the same time, closer collaboration between ecologists and remote sensing scientists will lead to better understanding of both fields’ needs and current limitations, enabling remote sensing outputs that are more valuable for a broader scientific community.
This session calls for recent studies showing advances in this field, with the scope of attracting scientists from both the remote sensing field and ecology or adjacent disciplines. We welcome both specialized and multidisciplinary contributions that advance the science of remote sensing of vegetation diversity or use its products in ecological studies. The session is also open to out-of-the-box approaches and biodiversity studies over other taxa.

In general, remote sensing allows examining and gathering information about an object or a place from a distance, using a wide range of sensors and platforms. A key development in remote sensing has been the increased availability of data with very high temporal, spatial and spectral resolution. In the last decades, several types of remote sensing data, including optical, multispectral, radar, LiDAR from different platforms (i.e. terrestrial, mobile, UAV, aerial and satellite platforms), have been used to detect, classify, evaluate and measure the earth surface, including different vegetation cover and forest structure. For the forest sector, such information allows efficient quantification of the state and monitoring of changes over time and space, in support of sustainable forest management, forest and carbon inventory or for monitoring forest health and their disturbances. Remote sensing data can provide both qualitative and quantitative information about forest ecosystems. In a qualitative analysis, forest cover types and species composition can be classified, whereas the quantitative analysis can measure and estimate different forest structure parameters related to single trees (e.g. DBH, height, basal area, tree species, timber volume, etc.) and to the whole stand (e.g. number of trees per unite area, spatial distribution, etc.). However, to meet the various information requirements, different data sources should be adopted according to the application, the level of detail required and the extension of the area under study. The integration of in-situ measurements with satellite/airborne/UAV imagery, Structure from Motion, LiDAR and geo-information systems offers new possibilities, especially for interpretation, mapping and measuring of forest parameters and will be a challenge for future research and application.
This session explores the potentials and limitations of remote sensing for applications in forestry, with the focus on the identification and integration of different methodologies and techniques from different sensors and in-situ data for providing qualitative and quantities forest information needed for various applications such as forest inventory, precision forestry, ecological modelling, habitat modelling, forest fire modelling.

Drylands, covering more than 40% of the Earth's land surface, are water-limited regions where evaporation exceeds precipitation. They serve as the main reservoirs of carbon regulating global trends and variability in atmospheric CO2, represent a key source to the global dust cycle, and host diverse endemic plants and animals. Moreover, drylands’ extent is projected to expand, as climate change intensifies aridity, triggering abrupt ecosystem changes which could affect services supporting more than two billion people. Consequently, developing integrated tools for assessing and monitoring of dryland ecosystems represents a high research priority. Advances in Earth observation —including high resolution UAV and satellite imagery and deep learning —have enabled unprecedented spatial, temporal and spectral resolution facilitating breath-taking progress in this field of research. However, dryland remote sensing is particularly challenging due to the complex landscapes, sparse vegetation, and high proportions of open areas with background effect. Moreover, biological soil crusts, representing soil surface communities of cyanobacteria, algae, lichens, and bryophytes, also affects the spectral signal of dryland soils. Owing to the various vegetation types that shows different timing responses to water pulses, their spectral response to the infrequent rainfall to be strongly heterogeneous and hampers the application of remote sensing methodologies for the monitoring of ecosystem state and processes in drylands.

This session invites novel remote sensing approaches and applications for drylands, focusing on surface component mapping and monitoring. A special focus is also on the new generation of hyperspectral satellite missions like Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) and their integration with other data sources, such as multispectral and hyper spatial resolution UAV imagery. All contributions of combining remote sensing and field data to identify ecosystem patterns, processes, and functional traits are also welcome.

Wetland ecosystems have gained attention in international agendas due to their role as nature-based solutions for climate change, biodiversity conservation, and water resilience. Despite their relevance, these ecosystems still face constant external threats that alter their natural processes and dynamics.
Developing effective wetland management strategies requires a deep understanding of their natural processes and the changes induced by external pressures. Satellite observations, using both passive and active sensors, offer an excellent opportunity for wetland monitoring from local to global scales, and are often the only source of information in remote and non-instrumented areas.
This session focuses on studies that use multitemporal satellite observations to understand different processes and components (e.g., water dynamics, vegetation changes, disturbances, soil moisture, biodiversity) of wetland ecosystems (e.g., marshes, swamps, fens, bogs, peatlands, lakes, ponds) with different regimes (e.g., permanent, temporary) and support the development of new applications and monitoring strategies.
This session also encourages but is not limited to studies using multi-sensors and machine learning technologies.

Environmental data from large measurement campaigns and automated measurement networks are increasingly available and provide relevant information of the Earth System. However, such data are usually only available as point observations and only represent a small part of the Earth´s surface. Upscaling strategies are hence needed to provide continuous and comprehensive information as a baseline to gain insights on large-scale spatio-temporal dynamics. In the upscaling, machine learning algorithms that can account for complex and nonlinear relationships are increasingly used to link remote sensing datasets to reference measurements. The resulting models are then applied to provide spatially explicit predictions of the target variable, often even on a global scale.
Due to easy access to user-friendly software, model training and spatial prediction using machine learning algorithms is nowadays straightforward at first sight. However, considerable challenges remain: dealing with reference data that are not independent and identically distributed, accounting for spatial heterogeneity when scaling reference measurements to the grid cell scale, appropriately evaluating the resulting maps and quantifying their uncertainties, generating robust maps that do not suffer from extrapolation artifacts as well as the strategies for model interpretation and understanding.
This session invites contributions on the methodology and application of large-scale mapping strategies in different disciplines, including vegetation characteristics such as foliar or canopy traits and photosynthesis, soil characteristics such as soil organic carbon, or atmospheric parameters such as pollutant concentration. Methodological contributions can focus on individual aspects of the upscaling approach, such as the design of measurement campaigns or networks to increase representativeness, novel algorithms or validation strategies, feature attribution/explainability as well as uncertainty assessment.

Better understanding and quantification of the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a pressing issue for climate science. The ability of the land surface to continue acting as a sink of anthropogenic emissions is unknown and, should it weaken or become a net source, there are significant implications for the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and hence the rate of climate change.

There are an increasing number of Earth Observation data streams that provide information beyond traditional spectral vegetation indices. Examples include Solar Induced Fluorescence from chlorophyll (SIF), Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD), LIDAR, as well as surface level flux inversions from observations of atmospheric trace gas concentrations (e.g. carbon dioxide and carbonyl sulphide). At the same time there are increasingly sophisticated methods for constraining models of the land surface with observations, including Machine Learning techniques and novel Data Assimilation algorithms.

This session will take stock of the diverse observations and model-data fusion methods for constraining models of the terrestrial biosphere. We invite abstracts on this topic in the broadest sense, from empirical top-down models through to detailed bottom up models using any type of algorithm to implement observational constraints or provide model validation. We are especially interested in submissions that use multiple data streams to constrain or validate models.

Agriculture covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s land surface and plays a vital role in sustaining global food and fodder production. Yet, it is increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change while still contributing to biodiversity of loss, soil degradation, and environmental issues. Policy frameworks and regulations at national and EU level create incentives and commitment towards more sustainable management. However, meeting these challenges and needs requires innovative approaches that enhance agricultural resilience, efficiency, and sustainability while reducing the environmental footprint and safeguarding ecosystems.
Recent advances in Earth observation, environmental research infrastructures, monitoring networks (e.g., FLUXNET), and the growing availability of in-situ measurements and open data provide unprecedented opportunities to monitor, understand, and manage agroecosystems. Coupled with advancements in data science, machine learning, and process-based modelling, these tools enable the transition from observation to actionable solutions that support climate-resilient agriculture and sustainable land management.
This session welcomes contributions that explore and integrate diverse approaches—including (but not limited to):
• Large-scale mapping strategies of agroecosystem processes and dynamics.
• Integration of multi-modal remote sensing data (spectral, thermal, high-resolution RGB from current and future satellite constellations, UAVs, or airborne campaigns) with in-situ observations and environmental monitoring networks.
• Applications of machine learning, radiative transfer modelling, and hybrid approaches.
• Foundation model development and applications within agroecosystems and agriculture
• Monitoring or modelling of soil–plant–water interactions and nutrient dynamics.
• Assessment of biotic and abiotic stresses, including water demand and evapotranspiration.
• Quantification of climate change impacts (e.g., biodiversity loss, hydrological extremes, soil degradation, ecosystem shifts) on agricultural systems and their resilience.
Contributions should be presented through a lens that aims not only to advance technical understanding, but also to demonstrate how these efforts translate into practical pathways for improving agroecosystem monitoring and management—across intensively and extensively managed crop and grassland systems—towards a more sustainable and climate-resilient future.

Agricultural production is increasingly vulnerable to climate variability, extreme weather, and growing resource limitations. To better understand these challenges and support adaptation, regional crop modeling has become an essential tool for assessing agricultural productivity, food and water security, and the impacts of climate variability and change. At the same time, the growing availability of satellite observations provides unprecedented opportunities to better constrain, calibrate, and validate crop model simulations. This session focuses on recent methodological and applied advances in linking regional crop models with Earth observation datasets to improve predictive accuracy and robustness.
We invite contributions that address:
• Advances in regional crop modeling frameworks (process-based, statistical, and hybrid)
• Integration of AI/ML techniques within a remote sensing and crop modeling framework
• Data assimilation techniques and model parameterization strategies
• Integration of remote sensing data into regional crop modeling systems
• Seasonal yield forecasting and the role of improved initial conditions via data assimilation
• Uncertainty quantification of regional crop model output
• Applications to water use, irrigation, and agro-hydrological monitoring
• Applications to assess and optimize climate change adaptation strategies
• Benchmarking and intercomparison of crop models with remote sensing data
This session brings together researchers in crop modeling, remote sensing, climate science, and data assimilation to advance integration across disciplines and tackle global challenges in agriculture and food security.

Imaging the Earth’s surface and reconstructing its topography to study the landscape and (sub-)surface processes has advanced rapidly over the past two decades, sometimes separately within different geoscience disciplines. New generations of satellites, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), LiDAR systems, Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods, ground-based systems, and deep learning approaches have made 2D, 3D, and 4D (time series) data acquisition easier, cheaper, and more precise. The spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions of the measurements cover wide ranges of scales, offering the opportunity to study the evolution of the ground surface from local to regional scale with unprecedented detail. Equipped with optimized workflows ranging from digitizing analogue data – such as historical aerial photographs – to processing near-continuous records of topographic change, geoscientists now have a variety of tools to better understand our rapidly changing environments and disentangle anthropogenic from natural drivers.

However, challenges still exist at both methodological and application levels. How to properly acquire images and 3D data in harsh, remote or non-ideal environments? How to process unknown, damaged and/or poorly overlapping digitized analogue photographs? How to assess measurement precision and incorporate this uncertainty in the results and interpretation? How to model complex camera distortions and/or the resulting systematic error? How to deal with large, heterogeneous time series and multi-modal data sets? These questions exemplify situations commonly faced by geoscientists.

In the present session, we invite contributions from a broad range of geoscience disciplines (geomorphology, glaciology, volcanology, hydrology, soil sciences, etc.) to share perspectives about the opportunities, limitations, and challenges that modern 2-4D surface imaging offers across diverse processes and environments. Contributions can cover any aspect of surface imaging and mapping, from new methods, tools, and processing workflows to precision assessments, time series constructions, and specific applications in geosciences. We especially welcome contributions that cover 1) novel data acquisition and processing approaches (including image matching, camera distortion correction, complex signal/image and point cloud processing, and time series construction), 2) data acquisition in complex and fast-changing environments, and 3) innovative applications in geosciences.

frequent and impactful weather-related disasters. Conversely, declines in water availability make monitoring surface water dynamics, including seasonal water body variations, wetland extent, and river morphology changes crucial for environmental management, climate change assessment, and sustainable development. Remote sensing is a critical tool for data collection and observation, especially in regions where field surveys and gauging stations are limited, such as remote or conflict ridden areas and data-poor developing nations. The integration of remotely-sensed variables—like digital elevation models, river width, water extent, water level, flow velocities, and land cover—into hydraulic models offers the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of hydrological processes and improve predictive capabilities.
Research has so far focused on optimising the use of satellite observations, supported by both government and commercial initiatives, and numerous datasets from airborne sensors, including aircraft and drones. Recent advancements in Earth observation (EO) and machine learning have further enhanced the monitoring of floods and inland water dynamics, utilising multi-sensor EO data to detect surface water, even in densely vegetated regions. However, despite these advancements, the update frequency and timeliness of most remote sensing data products are still limited for capturing dynamic hydrological processes, which hinders their use in forecasting and data assimilation. This session invites cutting-edge presentations on advancing surface water and flood monitoring and mapping through remotely-sensed data, focusing on:
- Remote sensing for surface water and flood dynamics, flood hazard and risk mapping including commercial satellite missions and airborne sensors
- The use of remotely-sensed data for calibrating or validating hydrological or hydraulic models
- Data assimilation of remotely-sensed data into hydrological and hydraulic models
- Enhancements in river discretization and monitoring through Earth observations
- Surface water and river flow estimation using remote sensing
- Machine learning and deep learning-based water body mapping and flood predictions
- Ideas for developing multi-satellite data products and services to improve the monitoring of surface water dynamics including floods
Early career and underrepresented scientists are particularly encouraged to participate.

It has become more than evident by now that the increasing complexity and resource intensiveness of performing state-of-the-art Earth System Science (ESS), be it from a modeling or a pure data collection and analysis perspective, requires tools and methods to orchestrate, record and reproduce the technical and scientific process. To this end, workflows are the fundamental tool for scaling, recording, and reproducing both Earth System Model (ESM) simulations and large-volume data handling and analyses.

With the increase in the complexity of computational systems and data handling tasks, such as heterogeneous compute environments, federated access requirements, and sometimes even restrictive policies for data movement, there is a necessity to develop advanced orchestration capabilities to automate the execution of workflows. Moreover, the community is confronted with the challenge of enabling the reproducibility of these workflows to ensure the reproducibility of the scientific output in a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) manner. The aim is to improve data management practices in a data-intensive world.

This session will explore the latest advances in workflow management systems, concepts, and techniques linked to high-performance computing (HPC), data processing and analytics, the use of federated infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) application handling in ESS. We will discuss how workflows can manage otherwise unmanageable data volumes and complexities based on concrete use cases of major European and international initiatives pushing the boundaries of what is technically possible and contributing to research and development of workflow methods (such as Destination Earth, DT-GEO, EDITO and others).

On these topics, we invite contributions from researchers as well as data and computational experts presenting current scientific workflow approaches developed, offered and applied to enable and perform cutting edge research in ESS.

Land surface processes play a key role shaping the Earth climate. As a core component of state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs), the representation of these processes critically influences and enables climate feedbacks that are essential for predictions and future climate-change projections, as investigated in international multi-model initiatives such as CMIP6 & CMIP7. However, land hydrology and its numerous interactions with other components of the Earth system (biosphere, biogeochemical cycles, anthropogenic disturbances/practices) is rather poorly represented in most state-of-the-art ESMs, potentially inducing erroneous responses to anthropogenic climate forcings at global, regional and local scales. For instance, ESMs do not represent the decline of groundwater levels that is increasingly observed in water-limited regions, threatening the subsistence of groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and thus leading to the risk of ecosystem shifts and to progressive levels of desertification.
This session is therefore open to observational and modeling contributions aimed at progressing the understanding and the modeling of the hydrological, biophysical and biogeochemical processes and couplings in land surface models. Particular attention will be dedicated to the representation of the interaction between hydrological processes and the biosphere (including the human component) to properly characterize the carbon-water nexus as well as the effects of land-based mitigation/adaptation options to climate change (e.g. involving management of forests, crops and irrigation practices, etc).
The overarching aim of this session is to provide an open and collaborative space that allows to bridge disciplinary gaps between members of the different communities involved in modeling the land surface for climate prediction and climate-change studies. We especially encourage contributions highlighting future priorities, innovative strategies and emerging opportunities to drive the development of next-generation ESMs.

EUMETView is EUMETSAT’s (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) online data visualization service, offering easy and open access to a wide range of meteorological satellite products in near-real time. It provides an entry point for users who wish to explore environmental data without the need for complex processing or infrastructure, making it a valuable tool for both beginners and more experienced users. In addition to data from EUMETSAT’s own missions, EUMETView also provides access to products from Copernicus Sentinel satellites operated by EUMETSAT, such as Sentinel-3 ocean and atmosphere data.

This short course will provide a beginner-level introduction to EUMETView and its related data access services. Participants will learn how to browse, select and visualise satellite data directly in the EUMETView interface, specifically products related to wildfire events (e.g. MTG Fire Temperature RGB, Copernicus Sentinel 3 Fire Radiative Power). In addition, the course will demonstrate how to programmatically access the EUMETView catalogue through its API using a simple Python notebook, enabling automated queries and download of products.

After retrieving products, participants will learn how to visualize and animate them, create simple time series of images to track the temporal evolution of events, and integrate EUMETView layers through the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) into external tools such as GIS software or Python environments.

The session will start with a short overview of EUMETView and its data streams, followed by live demonstrations and guided exercises. By the end of the course, participants will be familiar with the main functionalities of EUMETView, understand how to access data interactively and via API, and be equipped with practical examples on how to visualize and apply satellite products for wildfire monitoring independently. No prior coding knowledge is required, and all training material will be provided.

Earth system dynamics are strongly influenced by land‑surface processes that operate across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Sub‑daily land‑atmosphere coupling shapes cloud formation and radiation transfer; seasonal vegetation dynamics modulate evapotranspiration on weekly‑to‑monthly scales and shape the hydrologic cycle; and decade‑to‑century changes in ecosystem composition and soil carbon dynamics affect the global carbon cycle and atmospheric  CO₂. Human activities, such as land‑cover change, land‑management practices, and fossil‑fuel or biomass burning are the most impactful direct and indirect perturbations of the land surface. This session explores how these diverse changes, their impacts, and potential feedbacks operate from the global scale to regional hotspots. It focuses on four interlinked themes (remaining open to related topics), exploring the effects of land changes:

1. Radiative balance, including albedo changes and their effect on the planetary energy budget; modulation of land‑atmosphere coupling and low‑cloud formation; influence of biogenic volatile organic compound emissions on clouds.
2. Water cycle, including moisture recycling over land; trends in soil moisture and lower‑tropospheric humidity; CO₂-driven stomatal conductance and plant water‑stress dynamics; shifts in surface turbulent‑flux partitioning.
3. Carbon cycle, including changes in land carbon uptake and release fluxes, long‑term vegetation shifts, soil and vegetation carbon turnover, CO₂ fertilization, and nutrient dynamics.
4. Human‑societal impacts, including effects on ecosystem services such as water and food security, links between land degradation and societal vulnerability, and potential societal feedbacks.

Contributions should adopt a coupled Earth‑system perspective, investigating processes in interaction rather than isolation. We encourage submissions which (i) quantify the magnitude and direction of biogeophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks, (ii) identify key uncertainties in current CMIP‑style Earth‑system models, and (iii) propose concrete pathways to constrain these uncertainties. Innovative approaches that integrate multi‑stream observational datasets and hybrid or machine‑learning‑enhanced modeling are especially welcome. Join us in this session, hosted in partnership with the Max‑Planck‑Caltech‑Columbia‑Carnegie Center for Earth (mc‑3.org), which emphasizes this holistic view of land processes within the Earth system.

This Inter- and Transdisciplinary Session will critically re-examine outstanding questions and long-standing paradigms in Earth system science in the context of global climate. Earth system science has developed around the idea of dynamic interactions among atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere, and cryosphere, through flows of energy, material, and information.
Scientific progress helps us identify which of these flows are most important in different contexts, and the rules and processes —physical, biological, chemical, and ecological—that govern them. Over time, established ideas can be confirmed, challenged, or reshaped by new evidence, leading to gradual shifts or even step changes in understanding. To give some examples across disciplines and spatial-temporal scales:
- The understanding of clouds and their role in the Earth system is rapidly evolving, with major recent advances in mapping out and characterizing the properties of atmospheric aerosol particles and their interactions with clouds.
- The latest high-resolution climate simulations, built on decades on climate modelling, expose previously overlooked complexities in ocean-atmosphere coupling, revealing how fine-scale interactions can affect weather extremes.
- Soil organic matter was once conceptualized as chemically defined compartments with fixed turnover times, a view later revised to emphasize the role of physical protection mechanisms in controlling carbon and nutrient cycling.
- A century-old paradigm of vertical crustal stacking beneath the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen has been challenged by new geodynamical simulations revealing the Asian mantle as an active uplift mechanism and structural support for the region’s topography.
This session invites contributions that revisit and reflect on the foundational literature that has shaped our current understanding of Earth system science. We welcome critical engagement with influential frameworks or seminal papers —whether by questioning, expanding, or reinterpreting them in the light of recent advances. The aim is to explore how scientific knowledge evolves over time and how earlier ideas have informed this evolution and continue to affect or challenge present-day thinking.

Future pathways that stabilize global mean temperature towards the end of the century below 1.5 or 2 degrees need to increasingly rely on carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, followed by subsequent carbon dioxide conversion and storage. In this session we aim to discuss recent advances in understanding fundamental biogeophysical, biogeochemical and societal limitations for the implementation of negative emission strategies or technologies, including those relying on biomass production, such as afforestation, reforestation, or biomass production with carbon capture and storage, enhanced rock weathering, or technologies such as direct air carbon capture and storage with artificial photosynthesis. This session aims to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on biogeophysical limitations and potentials of carbon dioxide removal for the mitigation of anthropogenic global warming based on surveys, earth system modeling, or direct observations.

The Critical Zone (CZ), encompassing the Earth's surface from the top of the vegetation canopy to the bottom of the circulating groundwater, is essential for sustaining life and maintaining environmental health. Understanding this region of complex intersections within the natural world and between the environment and society requires a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach that transcends disciplinary and national boundaries, bridging gaps between short-term and long-term environmental processes. This session will highlight CZ science, CZ methodologies, and the collaborative efforts of CZ research sites and networks from around the world. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Innovative techniques in CZ research and monitoring, such as integrated observation and modeling approaches or hybrid methods; Advances in understanding soils, hydrology, and biogeochemical cycling within the CZ; Intersections of society and the CZ; Policy or management implications of CZ research; Development of CZ science networks; And case studies of successful national and international CZ collaborations.

This session calls for contributions from all disciplines and inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations that are addressing complex problems of effects of climate change and environmental degradation on human, animal, and ecosystems health. These may include, but are not limited to, data analysis and modelling approaches and data- and model-based solutions, indicators development, nature-based solutions, wellbeing-centered and other planetary health interventions. Likewise, the contributions can provide better understanding of or insights into wide range of problems, from air or water pollution or biodiversity loss, to human, animal, and environmental health issues like infectious and zoonotic diseases, or plastic pollution and antimicrobial resistance, driven by climate change or environmental degradation.

Carbon monitoring is becoming ever more critical as climate change accelerates and society turns to carbon management strategies, ranging from carbon credits to the preservation and restoration of natural carbon sinks. Yet the success of these approaches depends on robust science: measurements must be accurate, verification must be rigorous, and promises must be grounded in evidence. Machine learning (ML) is rapidly transforming carbon cycle research, offering new opportunities to integrate diverse data streams, harness remote sensing, and connect multiple lines of evidence across scales. This session will highlight recent advances in ML applications for investigating, monitoring, and managing the carbon cycle, spanning satellite-based greenhouse gas estimation, biomass and forest monitoring, soil and peatland carbon dynamics, wetland and ecosystem restoration, and the mapping of terrestrial and oceanic carbon storage. We particularly encourage contributions that address hybrid modeling, uncertainty quantification, ecological mapping, knowledge-guided and trustworthy ML in carbon markets and policy contexts. By bringing together advances from Earth observation, process modeling, and policy-relevant applications, this session aims to explore both the promises and challenges of ML in delivering actionable insights for carbon management and climate mitigation.

Tree rings are one of nature’s most versatile archives, providing insight into past environmental conditions at annual and intra-annual resolution and from local to global scales. Besides being valued proxies for historical climate, tree rings are also important indicators of plant physiological responses to changing environments and of long-term ecological processes. In this broad context we welcome contributions using one or more of the following approaches to either study the impact of environmental change on the growth and physiology of trees and forest ecosystems, or to assess and reconstruct past environmental change: (i) dendrochronological methods including studies based on tree-ring width, MXD or Blue Intensity, (ii) stable isotopes in tree rings and related plant compounds, (iii) dendrochemistry, (iv) quantitative wood anatomy, (v) ecophysiological data analyses, and (vi) mechanistic modeling, all across temporal and spatial scales.

Groundwater's strategic importance for ecosystems (biodiversity, and societies) is gaining prominence. Groundwaters play a critical role in natural cycles, redistributing water, energy and matters in the subsurface and sustaining surface water bodies and ensuring related biodiversity. Overall groundwater is key for continental areas, by providing essential ecosystem services hence ensuring water, energy, and food security.
Groundwater dynamics significantly impact ecosystems. Non stationarity of groundwater systems dynamics under global changes put these ecosystems at threat. Therefore, it is key to characterize these ecosystem-groundwater interrelationships by studying the quantitative and qualitative impacts of ecosystems on groundwater resources through a wide range of tools such as characterizing the transit and residence time of water and elements in groundwater systems, the vegetation-atmosphere-unsaturated zone interactions with the aquifers enabling to quantify in aquifer recharge and stream-aquifer exchanges.
To do that hydrogeological models are pivotal tools to characterise and anticipate potential change of these relationships between ecosystems and groundwater. However, due to the extreme heterogeneity of environmental processes and parameters, and our inability to fully characterise that heterogeneity, all hydrogeological models need to be calibrated against relevant geological, geophysical, hydrogeochemical and hydrological data to improve the robustness of predictions and reduce model uncertainty. Observatories provide long-term, spatially detailed information on groundwater resources, enabling in-depth studies, that consider the interplay of territorial changes together with climate change. These observatories therefore provide the opportunity to identify key processes driving these changes, occurring at the local or regional scales. Installed in heterogeneous environments, observatories consider different aquifer types at different geographical areas and reflect the interplay between land uses, climate zones, and human pressures on the dynamics of groundwater resources in ecosystems changing.
This session seeks to highlight innovative approaches that integrate field data with advanced modelling techniques to deepen the understanding of complex hydrological, hydrogeological, and ecohydrological systems under the impact of global change.

Disturbances, such as extreme weather events, play a key role in shaping ecosystems. Under climate change, extreme weather hazards undergo changes in frequency, intensity and seasonality. While ecosystem-based adaptation and nature-based solutions are gaining traction, it is crucial to elucidate the diverse interactions between extreme weather risk, ecosystems, and their services.
This session seeks to highlight research on the nexus of weather and climate-related extreme events and ecosystems. We encourage submissions on: 1) investigations into the key attributes and patterns of extreme weather events which affect ecosystem composition, structure and functioning, 2) studies on how ecosystems respond to and recover from extreme weather events across past, present, and future climates, 3) Implications of extreme weather impacts on ecosystems for biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. We welcome a diverse array of contributions, including theoretical analyses, modelling approaches, field studies, experimental designs, and remote sensing analysis.

Key topics include:
- Identification of extreme weather risk hotspots, and subsequent ecosystem responses (terrestrial, coastal, or marine) in past, present and future climates
- Role of extreme weather in shaping ecosystem composition, biodiversity, structure and functioning, and its impact on ecosystems service provisions across temporal and spatial scales
- Interactions of natural hazard, anthropogenic and biogenic disturbances with ecosystems (including compounding events)
- Ecosystem vulnerability, resilience and recovery dynamics under weather extremes, including regime shifts / tipping points in ecosystems
- Impact and efficacy of nature-based solutions under extreme conditions, risk of maladaptation or disservices

Nature-based solutions (NbS) and soil engineering strategies offer promising, multifunctional approaches to enhance climate resilience in both urban and landscape settings. However, the application of these strategies faces various challenges. This session invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore how soils and engineered green infrastructure can mitigate climate extremes such as heat, flooding, and drought. These strategies also aim to enhance water management, mitigate pollution, and promote the restoration of ecosystems and biodiversity.

We particularly welcome case studies, modeling approaches, and integrated planning frameworks that highlight the importance of soil structure, function, engineering design, and management in the effective implementation of NbS. Topics may include:
- Soil–water–vegetation interactions in urban and semi-urban environments
- Engineered soils and green infrastructure
- Potential and limitations
- Co-benefits and trade-offs across climate, ecological, and urban systems.

Urban air pollution comprises a complex mixture of pollutants, including particulates, trace gases, and volatile organic compounds, primarily from anthropogenic activities. The composition has been changing due to shifts from petroleum and diesel vehicles to those powered by compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which produce 95% less NOx than diesel and 65% less than petrol. Many nations are now focusing on electric vehicles (EVs), altering emission profiles and air pollutant chemistry through atmospheric transformation, photochemical reactions, and aging processes. These atmospheric pollutants create various health impacts, with studies linking air pollution to increased respiratory conditions.

This session at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) invites submissions on observational and modeling studies of emerging air pollution emissions and chemistry, including their climate and health impacts.

Urbanised landscapes are expanding at unprecedented rates while extreme climate events intensify, exposing billions of urban residents to risk of extreme heat, flooding, and environmental degradation. Green and blue urban infrastructure (trees, parks, lakes, and other vegetated or water-based systems) can help mitigate these impacts through mechanisms like transpirational cooling, filtering of particulate matter, and stormwater management. But urban vegetation itself is highly vulnerable to extreme climate events, hampering their ecosystem services. To guide sustainable urban development, we need a better understanding of the dynamics of the water cycle and energy balance in urban settings.
This session invites all research in urban environmental science from plant physiology to hydrology, from built to natural ecosystems, and across all methods of investigation. We aim at advancing our understanding of (1) the interactions between climate and vegetation in cities worldwide (2) strategies for optimizing the costs of urban ecosystems (e.g., irrigation, planting and removal) alongside their benefits (e.g., heat island mitigation, air quality amelioration and runoff reduction), and (3) the constraints that extreme urban climate places on urban vegetation and approaches to enhance the resilience of cities to such events.

Rural communities and nature-based tourism destinations are facing growing uncertainties related to climate change, natural hazards and pressures on natural environments stemming from tourism and outdoor recreation on both biodiversity and geodiversity. Industry, government and stakeholders must make decisions now to secure a sustainable and resilient future. This session, brings together transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research which leverages data-driven approaches to support decision-makers in strategy development. The focus is on the protection geo- and biodiversity along with recreational landscapes, addressing climate change and fostering trust in data to ensure informed and impactful decision-making for regions characterized by nature-based tourism and outdoor recreation. Topics of interest include:
• Linking Geoscience and social science methods in tourism and recreation research, studies and development
• Importance of geodiversity, biodiversity and ecosystem services in nature-based tourism
• Natural hazards, visitors’ perception and preparedness planning in nature-based tourism management
• Climate change adaptation and resilience in tourism destinations
• Resilient communities through sustainable tourism development
• Strategic decision-making
• Citizen and participatory approaches
• Using local knowledge for sustainable development and climate change mitigation
• Sustainable land use for touristic purposes
• Environmental and tourism policy and governance aspects
This inter- and transdisciplinary session brings together research on climate change, tourism and landscape development to form stronger links between geosciences and social sciences in order to foster an environment of data-driven decision-making and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Sitting under a tree, you feel the spark of an idea, and suddenly everything falls into place. The following days and tests confirm: you have made a magnificent discovery — so the classical story of scientific genius goes…

But science as a human activity is error-prone, and might be more adequately described as "trial and error". Handling mistakes and setbacks is therefore a key skill of scientists. Yet, we publish only those parts of our research that did work. That is also because a study may have better chances to be accepted for scientific publication if it confirms an accepted theory or reaches a positive result (publication bias). Conversely, the cases that fail in their test of a new method or idea often end up in a drawer (which is why publication bias is also sometimes called the "file drawer effect"). This is potentially a waste of time and resources within our community, as other scientists may set about testing the same idea or model setup without being aware of previous failed attempts.

Thus, we want to turn the story around, and ask you to share 1) those ideas that seemed magnificent but turned out not to be, and 2) the errors, bugs, and mistakes in your work that made the scientific road bumpy. In the spirit of open science and in an interdisciplinary setting, we want to bring the BUGS out of the drawers and into the spotlight. What ideas were torn down or did not work, and what concepts survived in the ashes or were robust despite errors?

We explicitly solicit Blunders, Unexpected Glitches, and Surprises (BUGS) from modeling and field or lab experiments and from all disciplines of the Geosciences.

In a friendly atmosphere, we will learn from each other’s mistakes, understand the impact of errors and abandoned paths on our work, give each other ideas for shared problems, and generate new insights for our science or scientific practice.

Here are some ideas for contributions that we would love to see:
- Ideas that sounded good at first, but turned out to not work.
- Results that presented themselves as great in the first place but turned out to be caused by a bug or measurement error.
- Errors and slip-ups that resulted in insights.
- Failed experiments and negative results.
- Obstacles and dead ends you found and would like to warn others about.

For inspiration, see last year's collection of BUGS - ranging from clay bricks to atmospheric temperature extremes - at https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU25/session/52496.

Motivation

Although in some communities (e.g., meteorology, climate science) the tradition of software writing has a long history, most scientists are not trained software engineers. For early-stage scientific software projects, which are typically developed within small research groups, there is often little expectation that the code will (1) be used by a larger community, (2) be further developed or extended by others, or (3) be integrated into larger projects. This can lead to an “organic” evolution of code bases that result in challenges related to documentation, maintainability, usability, reusability, and the overall quality of the software and its results.

The wider availability of large computing resources in recent decades, along with the emergence of large datasets and increasingly complex numerical models, has made it more important than ever for scientific software to be well-designed, documented, and maintainable. However, (1) established practices in scientific programming, (2) pressures to produce high-quality results efficiently, and (3) rapidly growing user and developer communities, can make it challenging for scientific software projects to

- follow a common set of standards and a style,
- are fully documented,
- are user-friendly, and
- can be maintained, easily extended or reused.

Session content and objectives

We invite developers or users of software projects to prepare presentations about the challenges and successes in the following topics

- Good practices for developing scientific software
- Modularization
- Documentation
- Linting
- Version control
- Open source and open development
- Automatization of quality checks and unit testing
- Planning new projects
- User requirements and the user-turned-developer problem
- Painless and energy-efficient programming solutions across computing architectures
- Modularization and reliability vs performance and multiplatform capacity
- Large-dataset compression and storage workflows

These presentations will show how different projects across geoscientific fields tackle these problems. We can discuss new strategies for bettering scientific software development and raising awareness within the scientific community that robust and well-structured software development enables meaningful and reproducible results, supports researchers —especially doctoral and post-doctoral students— in their work, and accelerates advances in data- and modelling-driven science.

During the last decades research in geosciences has become increasingly interdisciplinary. This is due to the fact that fundamental questions in science like “Which role did geological processes play in the origin of life on Earth?”, “How did the geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere interplay during the emergence and evolution of terrestrial life” and “Which geological and geophysical conditions ae necessary for the appearance of life on other celestial bodies” will not be answered by one discipline alone but require a concerted and coordinated approach involving many researchers with seemingly unrelated scientific backgrounds. Thus, boundaries between disciplines disappear and new cross-disciplinary fields like geochemistry, geobiology and astrobiology emerge. To be successful in such interdisciplinary fields the European research community needs to

• foster interdisciplinary research projects
• train the next generation of scientists in multidisciplinary research
• convince decision makers about the necessary of interdisciplinary research and training
• alert the general public to highlights of interdisciplinary research

Research in interdisciplinary fields opens a multitude of perspectives for researchers. Also, many of them meet lively interest of the general public. However, there are also challenges to be met: Firstly, researchers have to learn the language of fields seemingly unrelated to their own. Secondly, traditional curricular at universities might not always be open to or include interdisciplinary fields. Thirdly, there is always the chance of pseudoscience gaining ground.
In the proposed session following items could be discussed:

• Training in interdisciplinary fields like astrobiology: Experiences, chances, challenges and pitfalls
• Which channels and methods are apt to engage the general public (e.g. How can science fiction be used to interest people in research)
• How can we use interdisciplinary research areas to motivate young people to embark on a career in science?
• How to create efficient and sustainable European structures to coordinate and promote research in interdisciplinary fields

The experience of new structures like the European Astrobiology Institute in those areas could be of great value for other emerging interdisciplinary subjects. To our minds, such a session would be timely in a changing European science landscape.

Science is not above any socio- and geopolitical issues; rather it is intertwined with them. Societal and geopolitical conditions deeply affect the choices we make about what research to fund, whose knowledge to value, where and with whom to collaborate, and who can attend a conference. As scientists, especially in the Earth and planetary sciences, we cannot ignore the human and environmental consequences of our work. It is especially a present issue in Earth observation, where the majority of the satellites have dual-use operating for both scientific and military purposes. In many cases, scientific tools have facilitated ecocide, exploitation of land and natural resources under neocolonial structures.

While discussing security and safety is crucial during times of conflict, we also need to be aware of possible risks that securitisation poses on the ethical, social and environmental aspects of scientific work. This is also relevant for disaster and risk management and preparedness which many geoscientists are involved in.

This session invites presentations by individuals and teams that address questions like:

- How should geoscientists conduct research and collaboration in fragile or geopolitically unstable regions?
- How do geopolitical tensions or decisions influence geoscience research and collaboration, and what can geoscientists do about it?
- What are the impacts of political borders and decisions on the functioning of the Earth’s systems? How do they affect how geoscientists study the Earth’s systems?
- What are the roles of scientists, academic institutions as well as Earth science societies like EGU in facilitating international collaboration, and supporting academic advocacy and activism in times of geopolitical instability and tensions?
- What responsibilities do Earth and planetary scientists carry when their research is used to harm people and the environment?
- What other geoethical dilemmas arise in such circumstances, and how can they be resolved?

Examples may include current or past case studies of Earth science research that has:

- prevented or caused situations that escalated into conflicts
- increased transparency about the impact of war on people and places (e.g., InSAR monitoring of building damage)
- historical and current examples of geoscientific knowledge used for resource extraction, such as hydrocarbon, water and critical minerals, and their links to conflict, instability, forced migration, famines and underdevelopment