We will present relevant information and updates concerning the activities of the BG Division (and Biogeosciences journal) and decide on changes for the upcoming year. The OSPP awards from EGU25 will be handed to the awardees.

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 sources and sinks and predicting their future remains a substantial challenge, largely due to uncertainties in observing, attributing, and modelling GHG fluxes from regional to global scales. National- and sector-level budgets are particularly critical, as they provide the basis for assessing progress towards nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and inform mitigation policies.

This session brings together studies that improve understanding and quantification of budgets, trends, variability and drivers of major GHGs (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O) across land, ocean and atmosphere, while also advancing the inventory and Monitoring Reporting Verification (MRV) foundations needed for robust reporting, such as baseline definition, refinement of emission factors, uncertainty quantification, and scaling from site-level observations to national estimates.

Contributions across land, ocean and atmosphere are welcome, including land-use and forest-focused work where baselines and emission factors substantially influence national GHG accounts. We welcome diverse approaches, including (national) emissions inventories, field and remotely sensed observations, terrestrial and ocean biogeochemical modelling, Earth system modelling, atmospheric inverse modelling, and data-model integration. We encourage contributions integrating different datasets and approaches that provide new insights on processes influencing GHG budgets and trends across temporal scales, particularly where implications for reporting and policy are in focus.

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.

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.

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.

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. It is also open to studies investigating how turbulent transport and surface-layer processes upscale from the atmospheric boundary layer to mesoscale dynamics and ultimately to large-scale circulation in weather and climate systems. 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.

Surface exchange fluxes of heat, momentum and mass above the global oceans and at the poles (snowpack, sea-ice, ocean and land) have significant impacts on atmospheric composition, biogeochemistry and climate at regional to global scales. Atmospheric boundary layer processes mediate these chemical and physical fluxes. This session is intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum to bring together researchers working in the areas of meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, air quality, biogeochemistry, stable isotope research, oceanography, and climate above the global oceans and in the polar regions.

The session focuses on new research in several areas which include: air-sea fluxes of climate-active trace gases (CO2, CH4, N2O) mediated by the atmospheric boundary layer above the oceans and in polar regions; regional emission and vertical mixing of aerosol, such as cloud-forming particles (CCN/INP) and their precursors (including dimethyl sulfide (DMS), marine organic compounds and halogenated species) and their impacts on atmospheric composition and climate; atmospheric deposition of nutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus, iron) and its impact on ocean biological systems; and biogeochemistry-climate feedback loops in the ocean-atmosphere system. We also welcome studies on how these surface fluxes may change in response to climate warming, as well as the local to large-scale influences on these exchanges. An adequate understanding and quantification of these processes is necessary to improve modeling and prediction of future changes above the oceans and in the polar regions, their teleconnections with mid-latitude weather and climate (including meridional transport of heat, moisture, chemical trace species, aerosols and isotopic tracers), and the coupling between local and large-scale dynamics.

The session has strong 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 reporting on progress as well as critical knowledge gaps in polar regions will help define upcoming research programmes as part of Antarctica InSync and the International Polar Year 2032-33.

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.

We are delighted to announce that in the 23rd edition of the dust session, Dr Claudia Di Biagio (LISA) and Dr. Diego Villanueva (ETHZ) will provide solicited talks about their work on dust radiative properties and dust-driven droplet freezing.

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!

The interactions among the climate systems, ecosystems, and atmospheric chemistry are central to understanding Earth system dynamics in the Anthropocene. Climate regulates ecosystem structure and function through changes in temperature, precipitation, and extreme events, while ecosystems alter climate via biogeochemical (e.g., the carbon cycle) and biogeophysical (e.g., vegetation-induced albedo change) processes. For this climate–ecosystem coupling, atmospheric chemistry serves as a crucial bridge. Specifically, ecosystem emissions (e.g., wildfire plumes, biogenic emissions) affect cloud condensation nuclei and surface radiation balance, thereby influencing climate from regional to global scales. Meanwhile, air pollutants (e.g., ozone, aerosols) affect plant physiology (e.g., photosynthesis, stomatal conductance) and land-atmosphere energy and water exchanges, further modifying the climate system. Deliberate manipulation of atmospheric aerosols could be employed as a climate intervention strategy (e.g., solar geoengineering). Yet, current research faces two major limitations: (1) difficulties in observing multi-scale nonlinear processes, and (2) inadequate parameterizations in coupled models.
This session will bring together progress in observations, modeling, and applications to advance understanding of climate-ecosystems-atmospheric chemistry interactions. Topics include, but are not limited to:
• Observations: Integrating multi-source data (e.g., field measurements, remote sensing, flux networks, atmospheric monitoring) with controlled experiments (e.g., FACE, warming experiments) to identify key interactions;
• Modeling: Improving the multi-scale representations in Earth system models, developing high-resolution regional coupled models, and optimizing parameterizations of key processes such as biogenic emissions and biogeochemical feedbacks;
• Applications: Assessing how interactions between atmospheric aerosols/pollutants and ecosystems influence climate change mitigation and carbon neutrality goals, and quantifying the strength of the ecosystem-climate feedbacks to air quality under different scenarios, and evaluating the effectiveness and risks of aerosol/cloud-based geoengineering.
By addressing these topics, the session aims to advance understanding of coupled climate–ecosystem–chemistry processes, enhance predictive capability, and provide a stronger scientific foundation for climate adaptation and sustainable development.

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

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.

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.

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

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 Earth observations to the level of individual organisms, providing a critical link between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and biogeochemical modelling under rapid global change. However, bridging the temporal and spatial mismatches between plant trait data and biogeochemical cycles remains a major challenge.

This session addresses the role of plant traits, biodiversity, acclimation, and adaptation in regulating the biogeochemical cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur across scales. We welcome conceptual, observational, experimental, and modelling studies from local to global levels, including in situ and remote sensing approaches.

Merging with original session 3.24 "Unlocking fruit crop resilience to a changing climate through stable isotopes and plant phenotyping integration”, this year's focus highlights agroecosystems and perennial fruit crops increasingly subjected to climate-induced stressors such as drought, salinity, and temperature extremes, including studies that integrate plant traits with stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ²H, δ¹⁸O, δ³⁴S) and plant phenomics (e.g., RGB, infrared, chlorophyll fluorescence, hyperspectral sensing) to explore physiological plasticity, resource-use efficiency, and adaptive responses. Special focus is given to multi-scalar approaches that connect soil–plant–atmosphere interactions, genotype-specific resilience, and pedoclimatic influences on plant metabolism. By combining biogeochemistry, eco-physiology, and agronomy, this session seeks to advance trait-based understanding of plant responses to global change and to promote climate-resilient agricultural systems.

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.

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

Natural forest expansion is occurring across many regions due to the combined effect of climatic and land-use changes. At the same time, biodiversity is experiencing a decline whose control requires new tools enabling global monitoring.
Natural forest expansion 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. Although many local studies on this topic exist, most of the analyses have either a short temporal extent or a limited spatial scale. Historical geographical 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. Particularly, we seek for spatially-explicit diachronic approaches—combining modern remote sensing with historical cartography and aerial photos, permanent plots, ecological modeling, and socioeconomic analysis— to track where, why and with what consequences forests expand.

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, covering more than 40% of the Earth's land surface, are water-limited regions where evaporation exceeds precipitation. They are home to over a third of the world’s population, serve as reservoirs of carbon that regulate global trends and variability in atmospheric CO2, represent a key source to the global dust cycle, and host diverse endemic plants and animals. Drylands are vulnerable to climate and land-use change, and these pressures are expected to amplify the severity of climate extremes. At the same time, the extent of drylands is projected to expand, as climate change intensifies aridity, triggering abrupt ecosystem changes, which could affect services supporting local 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. Thus, developing integrated tools for assessing and monitoring dryland ecosystems represents a high research priority.

This session presents 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. Topics of this session include (i) novel remote sensing approaches and applications for drylands, focusing on surface component mapping and monitoring, (ii) investigations on interactions among dryland ecology, hydrology, and climatology; (iii) presentation of the development or application of novel approaches to quantify and characterize dryland carbon-water-ecosystem interactions across space and time; and (iv) addressing 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.

Global warming is rapidly changing cold regions and their ecosystems, from Earth’s high latitudes to high elevations. These environments harbour well-adapted yet fragile ecosystems, including permafrost peatlands and Arctic tundra, which have acted as natural sinks of carbon for millennia. This may be changing with climate warming, which is most pronounced at high latitudes and during wintertime. Warming induced snow cover loss, rain-on-snow events, widespread permafrost thaw and thermokarst formation, and other related phenomena, are transforming these ecosystems, causing drastic shifts in their biogeochemistry, hydrology, ecology, and morphology.

Most prior research on cold region ecosystems has focused on the growing season, even though plant and microbial activity, and biogeochemical turnover, continue under snow cover and sub-zero temperatures – affecting plant productivity, phenology and diversity year-round. Permafrost peatlands are vital components of the northern hydrological system and act as sources of carbon, nutrients and potential contaminants to aquatic ecosystems, but such linkages between the terrestrial and aquatic domain also remain understudied. Establishing both winter baselines and responses to climate warming is critical to gain a comprehensive understanding of high latitude and Alpine ecosystems year-round, their vulnerability to climate change, and to accurately project future environmental changes.

The goal of this session is to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion on the dynamics of cold region ecosystems under a rapidly changing climate. We aim to bring together varied perspectives from researchers working on biogeochemistry, microbiology and plant-soil processes. We welcome studies focusing on observational, experimental, remote sensing and modelling approaches to understand plant and microbial functioning, biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem disturbances, export to aquatic systems, and associated impacts during the growing season and non-growing season – emphasizing responses to changing seasonality and climatic regimes.

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.

Solicited author:
Dominik Zak

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.

Soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling are central to soil functions such as climate regulation, nutrient supply, water retention, and ecosystem resilience. Management practices strongly influence these processes, shaping the capacity of soils to store carbon, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and sustain productive ecosystems under increasing environmental pressures.

This joint session focuses on soil C and N cycling and related soil functions and processes, with particular emphasis on two soil domains that remain comparatively understudied: grassland soils and subsoils.

Contributions addressing grassland soils examine how management and restoration practices such as grazing regimes, fertilisation strategies, legumes, and silvopastoral systems, affect soil C sequestration, N cycling, and greenhouse gas emissions, and how these processes respond to broader drivers such as climate variability and grassland degradation.

Studies focusing on subsoils (below ~30 cm or the B-horizon) explore deep soil C and N dynamics, soil physical properties, soil–plant–atmosphere interactions, and the role of subsoils in long-term carbon storage, nutrient and water regulation, and ecosystem resilience. By integrating research across soil depths and land-use systems and managements, this session provides a holistic view of how management influences soil functions relevant to climate change mitigation and sustainable land management.

The interactions among plants, soils, and microbial communities are complex and strongly influences terrestrial biogeochemical cycles. Therefore, understanding the underlying processes and large-scale patterns of how environmental 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 feedbacks. 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 soil organisms (such as plants) and their environment shape terrestrial fluxes, biochemical cycles, and agro-ecosystem productivity. Life in soil can actively modify its physical environment to optimize growth and reproductive conditions. However, we lack detailed knowledge of the underlying mechanisms that shape these adaptive modifications and the feedback between their drivers. Furthermore, we do not understand how these interactions affect access to soil resources and processes, such as plant growth and bioturbation. The main challenge stems from the inherent complexity of biophysical and biochemical processes in soils and plants across multiple scales.
Experimental techniques such as non-invasive imaging and three-dimensional root system modeling tools have deepened our understanding of water and solute transport processes in the soil-plant system. Quantitative approaches that integrate across disciplines and scales serve as stepping stones to advance our understanding of fundamental biophysical processes at the interface between soils and plants.
This session targets research investigating soil-plant-related resource transfer processes and contributions linking biological processes and soil physics 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 structure formation.
- Mechanistic understanding of plant water use and gas exchange regulation under drought and their implementation in Earth system models.
The aim of this session is to highlight the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to address current and future challenges in soil and plant science and to foster scientific exchange across disciplines.

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 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 and Dr. Nataliya Bilyera as invited speakers for the session.

Understanding and predicting ecosystem responses to global change is increasingly urgent, as terrestrial ecosystems are exposed to more frequent and intense climatic extremes such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires, and/or permafrost thaw. These stressors profoundly affect vegetation dynamics and impact soil functioning through the disruption of tightly coupled carbon, water, and nutrient cycles, with consequences for ecosystem resilience, recovery trajectories, and feedbacks to the climate system.

This session focuses on ecosystem responses to global change and extreme events, emphasizing the tight coupling between biogeochemical and water cycles and their effect on vegetation. Plant physiological responses to stress, such as changes in photosynthesis, transpiration, carbon allocation, and nutrient uptake, directly alter ecosystem-scale carbon, water, and nutrient fluxes and interact with soil processes by shaping soil moisture regimes, microbial activity, and the decomposition and stabilization of organic matter. Conversely, biogeochemical changes triggered by extremes include altered nutrient availability, mineral transformations, soil chemistry changes, and can have strong feedbacks on vegetation functions, recovery, and competitive interactions. Studying these interconnected processes is essential to improve mechanistic understanding of ecosystem resistance, resilience, and legacy effects following stress and disturbance in order to develop sustainable management interventions.

We welcome contributions across multiple spatial and temporal scales using laboratory experiments, field observations, remote sensing, modelling, novel analytical techniques, data synthesis, and/or presenting innovative management strategies. The session aims to foster interdisciplinary discussion at the interface of vegetation functioning, soil processes, and biogeochemical cycling, to advance understanding of ecosystem responses in a rapidly changing world.

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. This gap is particularly acute for African tropical forests which remain comparatively underrepresented in pantropical syntheses despite their major contribution to the global carbon cycle.

In this session, we aim to place a particular emphasis on the dynamics of disturbance, recovery, and resilience 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, particularly on data poor regions like Central Africa. 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.

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.

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.

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 (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are major, long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs), which foster global warming and significantly impact atmospheric chemistry dynamics. The aquatic realm is a vast component of the Earth system, and the balance between sources and sinks of these gases largely determines their contribution to the global radiative balance. Hence, understanding the mechanisms of production, consumption, and emissions of aquatic-derived GHG is crucial for improving predictions of their future changes with ongoing climate change.
While the occurrence and oversaturation of GHG across the water column and sediments in marine, estuarine, and lacustrine systems are well documented, the understanding of GHG dynamics in the aquatic realm remains a major scientific challenge, shaped by geological, oceanographic/limnological, biological, and anthropogenic factors. This session invites contributions addressing recent advances in understanding the biogeochemical cycling, microbial pathways, and fluxes of CH4, N2O and CO2 in aquatic environments. We welcome studies based on laboratory and mesocosm experiments, field observations, remote sensing and modelling approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• GHG cycling and emissions in estuarine and other transitional water bodies across all latitudes.
• The role of nutrient and pollutant transport across the land-ocean continuum, submarine groundwater discharge, and benthic-pelagic coupling in GHG cycling.
• CH4, N2O and CO2 formation, transport, and consumption, including specific microbial processes involved.
• Microbe-mineral and microbe-animal interactions (including symbioses) and how these affect CH4, N2O and CO2 turnover.

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.

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.

Waterscapes are connected networks of waterbodies, wetlands and surrounding terrestrial environments, linked by surface and subsurface flows that shape coupled processes across scales. They provide critical ecosystem services, including hydrological regulation, nutrient retention, carbon sequestration and biodiversity support. This session explores physical, biogeochemical and ecological processes in waterscapes from local to regional scales. We welcome contributions examining these processes in inland and coastal waters and wetlands, as well as studies assessing associated ecosystem services. We aim to foster interdisciplinary exchange among researchers using diverse approaches (e.g., remote sensing, modelling and field observations) across hydrology, ecology, biogeochemistry and the social sciences.

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.

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.

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 paleo-environments and -geography 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. Further, as paleogeography exerts a fundamental control on Earth’s climate and the evolution of life, we welcome contributions that reconstruct paleogeography and explore its impacts, from the reconstruction of ancient supercontinents to the controls of ocean gateways on climate and biotic dispersals.
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 further encourage submissions that use new approaches to unravel the interplay between paleogeography, paleoclimate, and biological evolution across Earth’s history. We aim to understand our planet and its biosphere and climate through both observation- and modelling-based studies.

The geological record provides insight into how climate processes operate and evolve in response to different than modern boundary conditions and forcings. Understanding past 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 past climates (e.g., DeepMIP, MioMIP, PlioMIP) have been initiated within the wider PMIP, helping to bridge the gap between palaeoclimate modelling and data communities. This session invites work on past climate, Earth System model simulations and proxy-based reconstructions from the Precambrian to the Quaternary. 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.

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.
Contributions presenting an applied as well as a theoretical approach are invited, including papers related to reconstructions (at various time and space scales), fractionation factors, measurement methods, proxy calibration, and verification.

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.

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.

Climate and environmental changes have long shaped the terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity patterns, species dispersal, and human societies across timescales from deep time to the present and into the future. Variability in hydroclimatic conditions, temperature regimes, vegetation structure, fire dynamics, and water availability have influenced the distribution of terrestrial life forms, extinctions and adaptations, large-scale migrations and settlements, evolutionary innovations, ecosystem structure, and development of complex societies. For example, in the Eurasian arid and semi-arid regions connected to the Silk Road, climate variability affected exchange networks, mobility, and civilisational trajectories. Alongside the accelerating climate impacts, modern human activities have added unprecedented pressures to biodiversity and natural habitats.

This session explores climate-ecosystem interactions across space and time, integrating research on vegetation and fauna (including humans), and the broader aspects of ecosystem feedbacks and societal adaptations. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions integrating climate science, paleoecology, evolutionary biology, archaeology, history, genetics, geography, conservation science, and proxy-based and modeling approaches. Topics of interest include,

- Species extinctions, adaptations and the ecological impacts
- Vegetation and biome dynamics
- Biodiversity changes
- Fire and disturbance regimes
- Habitat degradation
- Hominin dispersal and habitat dynamics
- Climate-human-landscape interactions
- Agricultural adaptations
- Environmental influences on trade and exchange systems, including Silk Road contexts.

By bridging past, present, and future perspective, this session aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration on the intertwined histories and futures of climate, life, and society.

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, actuopaleontological 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.

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.

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.

Highly diverse soil biotic communities are central drivers of biogeochemical processes, and soil biodiversity as a “hot topic” has been raising political interest. We now increasingly understand the diversity, composition and even functional profiles of many soil taxa, still, the integration of physiological functions, community interactions and functional group composition into biogeochemical processes in heterogeneous soil systems remains limited due to methodological challenges. Developing fields of –omics, micro-/spectroscopy, isotope labelling and improved biomarker interpretations allow direct analyses of the activity of microorganisms and fauna in soil, contributing important novel perspectives in soil science. These emergent approaches are critical to predict how environmental changes modifies biogeochemical processes, as climate change, agricultural practices and pollutants threatens soil biodiversity. Our session presents research exploring soil biotic dynamics from individuals to complex communities with a focus on their impact on soil carbon and nitrogen cycling. The impact of environmental change on the functions of diverse biotic groups is explored with an exciting range of novel techniques. Beside a focus on soil microbial dynamics, understudied groups including protists, soil fauna and diverse trophic interactions are highlighted.

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

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.

This session is merged from the sessions "Long-Term Flux Observation and Ecosystem Research Networks - Benefits for Science and Society" and "Using Flux Measurement for Immediate Societal Benefits".

The first part of the session provides:

• A discussion platform to exchange the state-of-the-art and novel developments in such long-term research networks
• Recognition of the multiple values of these networks for science and society
• Mutual interaction between users, networks organisers, and stations

Specific topics are :

1. Characteristics and challenges of long-term measurements in research networks: e.g., adaptation to change (scientific progress, technology change, and scopes), data harmonisation, new methods and procedures, attribution of ecosystem changes to external versus internal factors.
2. Scientific results specific to the analysis of long-term data: among others, e.g,. temporal scales of change: climate change, trends and variability, role of network products for synthesis studies
3. Synergy from collaboration with other scientific communities (e.g. collocation with other networks, campaign studies, scientific studies)
4. Sustainability and purposes to society – dialogue with stakeholders and users, participation

The second part focuses on using flux measurements for immediate societal benefits:

• Most of the ongoing GHG measurements are used for important discoveries achieved through process-level academic studies, and for long-term climate and ecosystem modeling. Most of the water measurements at the GHG flux sites are used for applications of computing and interpreting ecosystem-level GHG exchange.

• Such measurements use ultra-high-resolution methodology and state-of-the-art hardware vastly superior to typical monitoring-grade methods and equipment deployed outside academia for a wide range of non-academic decision-making applications, from gas leaks to drought or heat wave detections. However, despite providing exceptional ways to measure GHG emissions and ET, direct flux measurements are very rarely utilized outside academia.

This part of the session, organized through research-industry collaborations, presents new ideas and existing examples of how to better utilize direct flux measurements for immediate societal benefits.

Forests worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges. While they provide critically important ecosystem services such as carbon storage, flood protection, clean air, local cooling, or maintaining biodiversity, their resilience is increasingly put under pressure by intensifying disturbances such as fires, storms, droughts, or pests. Mitigation measures such as afforestation, forest restoration, forest protection and innovative forest management have been promoted, but their efficiency and impact on ecosystem services are ambiguous and are location dependent.
Growing evidence indicates a decrease in the carbon sink strength and storage capacity of forest ecosystems in recent years. Furthermore, forest management strategies primarily optimized for climate change mitigate might, in certain contexts, conflict with biodiversity conservation objectives, and vice versa. Thus, identifying pathways for sustainable and resilient forestry is a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor task and needs an understanding of the biophysical, social, ecological, economic, and governance implications. These issues are central to the European Green Deal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health strategy and are also at the heart of the EU H2020 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 covering the following topics
• management history, biomass production, carbon gains and losses
• biogeochemical and biophysical properties of forest stands
• interactions with atmospheric chemistry, e.g. aerosols and BVOC production
• bioeconomic aspects and wood production
• scenarios for alternative future forest management
• Modeling past and future climate impacts on forests and the delivery of different ecosystem services under different 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
• The implications of forest-based mitigation measures on enhancing forest resilience against major disturbances and extreme events
• Methods and tools for decision and adaptation support in the forestry, considering multiple stakeholders and multifunctional perspectives

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.

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 and beyond. 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, the Paris Agreement mitigation goal and temperature overshoot, with particular interest in remaining carbon budgets, negative emissions, emission pathways entailing net-zero targets, carbon dioxide removal strategies, the theoretical underpinnings of these concepts, and their policy implications. We will explore global climate dynamics under peak and decline pathways, on regional to global climate impacts in overshoot scenarios, and mechanisms of irreversibility, particularly the risk of non-linear Earth system change.

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, and the feasibility and side effects of large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal. 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 also invite analysis focusing on consequences in a wide range of Earth System components and sectors, from ocean dynamics to the cryosphere, biodiversity and biosphere changes to human systems and economic consequences of overshoot, as well as the implications of overshoots for climate change adaptation planning.

We invite contributions that use a variety of tools, including fully coupled Earth System Models (ESMs), sectoral impact models, 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.

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.

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.

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 crucial role in shaping the Earth's climate and in modulating hydrometeorological variability as well as the occurrence of compound extreme events. As a core component of state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs), their representation critically influences and enables climate feedbacks essential for predictions and climate-change projections. However, land hydrology and its interactions with other components of the Earth system (e.g. biosphere, biogeochemical cycles, anthropogenic disturbances/practices) remain poorly represented in most ESMs, potentially inducing erroneous responses to anthropogenic climate forcings at global to local scales and leading to misrepresentations of the occurrence, intensity and sequencing of droughts, floods and their compound manifestations. For instance, ESMs do not represent the observed decline of groundwater levels in water-limited regions, threatening the subsistence of groundwater-dependent ecosystems and exacerbating persistence and impact of droughts, thereby increasing the risk of ecosystem shifts and to progressive desertification.
This session is therefore open to observational and modeling contributions advancing the understanding and representation of hydrological, biophysical and biogeochemical processes and couplings in land surface models, including the simulation and predictability of compound extreme events across time scales. 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, human-water feedbacks, and the effects of land-based mitigation/adaptation options to climate change.
The session also welcomes contributions on high-resolution ESMs, advanced observation systems, and emerging data-driven and Artificial Intelligence approaches that enhance early warning capabilities and support resilience to compound hydrometeorological hazards.
The overarching aim of this session is to provide an open and collaborative space to bridge disciplinary gaps within and across communities involved in land surface modeling, and to strengthen links between land surface process representation and downstream applications in climate prediction and climate-change studies, with particular relevance for compound extreme events and transitions, while highlighting priorities and emerging opportunities for 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.

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 experiments, modeling, 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, modeling, and experimental 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 is a central component of the Critical Zone, sustaining a wide range of groundwater‑dependent ecosystems (GDEs) and regulating the redistribution of water, heat, and solutes through the vadose and saturated zones. These ecosystems are closely linked to subsurface hydrological processes. In turn, these processes modulate groundwater recharge, storage, and flow pathways. These interactions encompass groundwater uptake by vegetation, biogeochemical reactions in aquifers, bioturbation and nutrient recycling by groundwater resident fauna, and soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions. Understanding these processes requires a mechanistic approach that combines physical hydrology, hydrogeophysics, ecohydrology, and groundwater biology.

Environmental change further introduces significant non‑stationarity into aquifer systems, reshaping the resilience of groundwater‑dependent ecosystems and the services they provide. Identifying and predicting these dynamics calls for integrating local-scale field observations, long‑term monitoring, spatial mapping of GDEs, geophysical imaging and advanced modelling from plant to regional scales. Emerging hydrogeophysical tools, such as full‑waveform inversion, distributed temperature sensing, or 3D geostatistical characterisation, as well as transient ecohydrogeological modelling, play a growing role in detecting ecosystem-groundwater interactions, quantifying subsurface heterogeneity and flow pathways, and improving process scaling and predictive capacity.

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 multifunctional opportunities to strengthen climate resilience in both urban and rural environments. Healthy soils and well designed green infrastructures can help mitigate extreme heat, flooding, and drought, while improving water retention, reducing pollution, and supporting biodiversity and ecosystem restoration. Yet their implementation is often hindered by limited awareness of soil functions, competing land use pressures, and difficulties integrating subsurface knowledge into planning and design processes.
Across Europe, soil health is under growing pressure from land take, erosion, pollution, and climate change. These pressures undermine soils’ ability to provide many NbS to overcome problems and essential ecosystem services such as food production, carbon storage, and clean water. Mission Soil(EC, 2021) identifies spatial planning as a key instrument for achieving land degradation neutrality. However, soils and subsoils remain largely invisible in current planning and education, with many policymakers, landowners, and planners unaware of the opportunities and constraints that soil systems present.
This special session invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore how soil structure, function, and engineered soil systems can be integrated into spatial planning, urban design, and landscape engineering to create climate adaptive and ecologically robust environments. We welcome case studies, modelling approaches, and planning frameworks that assess potentials, limitations, co benefits, and trade offs across climate, ecological, and urban systems.
By embedding soil knowledge and soil care into planning and design, we can support healthier soils, enhance climate resilience, and avoid unintended trade offs across functions, generations, and landscapes.

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.

Rapid urbanization and climate change are intensifying urban heat stress, flooding, and environmental degradation, increasing risks to human health, infrastructure, ecosystems, and long-term sustainability. Interacting heat islands and extreme precipitation create compound hazards that require integrative approaches across climatology, hydrology, ecology, and urban planning. Green and blue infrastructure (trees, parks, vegetated surfaces, and water bodies) offers nature-based solutions through cooling, stormwater retention, and air quality and carbon benefits, yet their effectiveness is constrained by extreme urban climates, resource limits, and socio-economic factors.
This session brings together research that advances the characterization, modeling, and mitigation of urban heat and flood risks through quantitative, data-driven, and geospatial approaches. We welcome contributions leveraging remote sensing, in-situ observations, numerical and process-based models, spatial statistics, machine learning, as well as the integration of multi-source datasets (satellite, airborne, ground-based, and socio-economic). Particular emphasis is placed on understanding heat–flood interactions, evaluating green adaptation strategies across scales, and assessing their impacts on microclimate, hydrology, energy demand, biodiversity, and human well-being.
Topics of interest include geospatial and AI-based methods to monitor, model, and predict urban heat dynamics, quantitative assessments of urban heat island mitigation and cooling demand, modeling of flood attenuation and runoff reduction through green infrastructure, integrated analyses linking heat with air quality, health, energy use, and social vulnerability, and strategies to optimize the costs and benefits of urban ecosystems under climate stress. By bridging geospatial analyses, modelling frameworks, and urban environmental science, this session aims to deepen understanding of urban climate processes and support the design of resilient, sustainable, and climate-adaptive cities.

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.