Special Programme Group Session led by Panos Panagos, Calogero Schillaci, Arwyn Jones, Nils Broothaerts, Diana Vieira, Carmen Sanchez Garcia

Soil System Sciences face urgent challenges: accelerated depletion of soil resources, land degradation, climate extremes, and rising food security demands requiring coordinated scientific and policy responses.

The European Soil Observatory (EUSO) was established to provide a robust evidence base for soil policy and management at European scale. Its Stakeholder Forum fosters partnerships with academia, research communities, and organisations such as the Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division. This Special Session will examine scientific priorities in the SSS community and explore how collaboration with the EUSO can address research gaps and inform policy.

Key policy initiatives include:
• The proposed Soil Monitoring and Resilience Law (European Commission, July 2023) for monitoring soil health, sustainable management, and restoration of contaminated sites.
• Mission Soil, which will create 100 Living Labs to achieve healthy soils by 2050.
• The Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation, a voluntary EU framework for certifying carbon removals, soil emission reduction, and biodiversity co-benefits.

The session will feature a panel discussion with experts from the Joint Research Centre, relevant Directorate-Generals, EU agencies (EEA, EFSA), FAO, ESA, and COPERNICUS. Panelists will address challenges in soil monitoring, data harmonisation, and technology development, and showcase how EUSO’s centralised platform supports soil data flows, policy development, and restoration efforts.

Emphasis will be placed on transdisciplinary research, collaboration among scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders, and adoption of emerging tools such as digital soil mapping, soil sensing, and precision agriculture to enhance soil conservation and climate resilience.

Expected outcomes include a stronger EUSO–SSS partnership, improved cross-institutional collaboration, and broader awareness of EUSO’s role in supporting soil policy and management. Structured discussion will encourage knowledge exchange and highlight strategies for effective soil data integration and conservation initiatives across Europe and the Mediterranean.

This session welcomes all stakeholders engaged in soil monitoring and policy and aims to advance cooperation between the research and policy communities to safeguard soils for future generations.

Involving society in science, such as the processes of soil formation and restoration, but also topics as agriculture and environmentalism, is essential to collect precious information and opinions from stakeholders on one side and give feedback to people about the outcomes of present and ongoing research on the other side. This involvement contributes to setting up more effective environmental actions and policy strategies, thanks to the more active participation of citizens and stakeholders in environmental decision-making. Using social media and social networking for transferring soil science to society is also a way to explore and reinforce if we want to bring society’s attention to soil science. This session aims to prepare a state-of-the-art and set up useful indications about (positive and negative) experiences, best practices, education tools, and projects about relationships between citizens and researchers in soil science. The suggested case studies may represent milestones in the difficult process to bridge the existing gaps between research and society. New investigation paths may be open, in order to face the current environmental issues of soil sciences in a highly-dynamic age. Social media and networking specific studies that are relevant to soil science are encouraged to be presented as topics in this session.

Science communication includes the efforts of natural, physical and social scientists, communications professionals, and teams that communicate the process and values of science and scientific findings to non-specialist audiences outside of formal educational settings. The goals of science communication can include enhanced dialogue, understanding, awareness, enthusiasm, influencing sustainable behaviour change, improving decision making, and/or community building. Channels to facilitate science communication can include in-person interaction through teaching and outreach programs, and online through social media, mass media, podcasts, video, or other methods. This session invites presentations by individuals and teams on science communication practice, research, and reflection, addressing questions like:

What kind of communication efforts are you engaging in and how are you doing it?
What are the biggest challenges or successes you’ve had in engaging the public with your work?
How are other disciplines (such as social sciences) informing understanding of audiences, strategies, or effects?
How do you spark joy and foster emotional connection through activities?
How do you allow for co-creation of ideas within a community?
How are you assessing and measuring the positive impacts on society of your endeavours?
What are lessons learned from long-term communication efforts?

This session invites you to share your work and join a community of practice to inform and advance the effective communication of earth and space science.

All science has uncertainty. Global challenges such as disaster risk, environmental degradation, and climate change illustrate that an effective dialogue between science and society requires clear communication of uncertainty. Responsible science communication conveys the challenges of managing uncertainty that is inherent in data, models and predictions, facilitating the society to understand the contexts where uncertainty emerges and enabling active participation in discussions. Uncertainty communication can play a major role across the risk management cycle, especially during decision-making, and should be tailored to the audience and the timing of delivery. Therefore, research on quantification and communication of uncertainties deepens our understanding of how to make scientific evidence more actionable in critical moments.

This session invites presentations by individuals and teams on communicating scientific uncertainty to non-expert audiences, addressing topics such as:

(1) Innovative and practical tools (e.g. from social or statistical research) for communicating uncertainty
(2) Pitfalls, challenges and solutions to communicating uncertainty with non-experts
(3) Communicating uncertainty in risk and crisis situations (e.g., natural hazards, climate change, public health crises)

Examples of research fitting into the categories above include a) new, creative ways to visualize different aspects of uncertainty, b) new frameworks to communicate the level of confidence associated with research, c) testing the effectiveness of existing tools and frameworks, such as the categories of “confidence” used in expert reports (e.g., IPCC), or d) research addressing the challenges of communicating high-uncertainty high-impact events.

This session encourages you to share your work and join a community of practice to inform and advance the effective communication of uncertainty in earth and space science.

Soil-erosion models are increasingly popular within the scientific community. These models are often easy to use and enjoy a good reputation with stakeholders and policymakers. In particular, the new EU ‘soil deal for Europe’ is expected to be largely influenced by soil-erosion models and their estimates of how erosion can affect soil health. However, there is a dissonance between what we hope to achieve from modelling and (i) our knowledge of the conceptual and empirical limitations of soil-erosion models, and (ii) our inability to ascertain confidence in model predictions based on empirical measurements that are compatible with model structures. This dissonance has led to a reliability crisis that, left unchecked, risks eroding the credibility of the research field.
This session will foster a discussion on the way out of the reliability crisis by rethinking current challenges in erosion modelling and proposing alternatives to push the science forward. As such, we welcome a wide range of contributions, from critical perspectives to applied research. Specifically, we encourage contributions dealing with:
(i) new approaches to modelling soil erosion
(ii) novel approaches to collecting soil-erosion data
(iii) the use of novel field and/or remote sensing techniques to improve model parameterisation and evaluation
(iv) new or improved methods for model calibration and model testing – particularly approaches that increase model falsifiability and/or that report case studies of model invalidation (if you have “bad” results, we want to hear about it!)
(v) uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis
(vi) the use of erosion models to develop and test hypotheses about soil systems
(vii) translating (uncertain) modelled erosion rates into risk assessments for policymakers
In addition, we expressly encourage contributions that provide critical yet constructive perspectives on soil-erosion modelling and that will enrich the session discussion. We also welcome interdisciplinary contributions bridging the gap between mathematical modelling, sociology and philosophy of science, and policy making.

Soil erosion remains one of the greatest threats to soil health, food security, and ecosystem resilience. While advances in measurement, modelling, and conservation practices have expanded our understanding of erosion dynamics, the socio-economic and environmental consequences of soil degradation remain insufficiently integrated into land management and policy.
This session invites contributions that explore soil erosion and conservation not only as biophysical processes, but also as challenges at the interface of science, management, and society. We welcome studies that address the impacts of erosion on soil functions, such as carbon and nutrient cycling, water quality, biodiversity, and climate regulation. Equally encouraged are perspectives on conservation strategies, governance mechanisms, and the socio-economic dimensions of soil management, including costs, benefits, and barriers to adoption. By bridging disciplinary perspectives—from soil science to agronomy, economics, and policy—this session aims to highlight integrated approaches that can inform sustainable soil management, restoration, and climate adaptation strategies at local to global scales.
We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following subjects:
- Advances in monitoring and modelling of soil erosion under climate and land-use changes;
- Impacts of erosion on soil functions, fertility, water resources, and ecosystem services;
- Conservation practices and nature-based solutions for sustainable soil management;
- Socio-economic dimensions of erosion and conservation: adoption, incentives and costs;
- Policy frameworks and governance mechanisms linking soil conservation to sustainability goals;
- Case studies at farm, catchment, regional, or global scale;
- Interdisciplinary approaches linking soil processes, management practices, and societal impacts.

Soil erosion has been traditionally divided into sheet, rill, and gully erosion. Rills and gullies concentrate overland flow, leading to a significantly increased flow erosivity. These forms of concentrated flow erosion, both above and below ground, represent an important sediment source within watersheds and produce sizeable economic losses (e.g. reduced crop yields, reservoir sedimentation). Moreover, rills and gullies are effective links for transferring runoff, sediment and pollutants. Despite their relevance, the physical mechanisms that constitute concentrated flow erosion remain poorly understood.
This session aims to address this research gap and will focus on recent studies aiming to better understand the process of rill and gully erosion, with the ultimate aim of developing predictive tools and effective management strategies. As such we welcome contributions on: monitoring and measurement techniques; the factors and processes controlling rill, piping and gully erosion; modelling approaches; restoration and control; and the role of piping, rills and gullies in hydrological and sediment connectivity.

Soil erosion is one of the principal drivers of land degradation, with numerous on-site effects on soil availability and quality, and off-site impacts on land and aquatic environments. The environmental, economic and political impacts of land degradation motivate a comprehensive scientific understanding of the physical processes controlling soil detachment, transport and deposition at a range of spatial and temporal scales. Process knowledge is vital when developing measurement, modelling and monitoring techniques, as well as suggesting conservation strategies to farmers, land managers and policy makers.

This session will discuss the most recent scientific developments in soil erosion sciences and closely associated land degradation processes in agriculture, forest and rangelands. Spanning across multiple disciplines, the session will naturally integrate all driving forces of erosion (hydrological, aeolian, mechanical) focussing on water, wind, tillage and harvest (SLCH) erosion as well as the numerous anthropogenic factors which interact with these processes.

The following topics will form the areas of presentation and discussion:

• Measurements - by means of field studies or laboratory experiments developing process understanding (e.g. from interrill to gully erosion).
• Monitoring - short to long-term assessments tracking changes through time, by means of local assessments or remote sensing techniques.
• Modelling approaches – innovative simulation techniques from empirical, to process based, to data-driven, and from plot to global scale, addressing current and future land condition and climate change drivers.
• Mitigation and restoration – to address on-site and off-site impacts on soils and water.

Our objective is to discuss soil erosion processes and their impacts, while exploring strategies which support stakeholders (farmers, land managers or policy makers) and ongoing initiatives such as the Soil Monitoring Law in the European Union, the target of land degradation neutrality by 2030, and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030).

Torrent control works (such as check dams) and soil conservation techniques (e.g., terracing, mulching, afforestation) have been strategically used for several decades to control catchment hydrology and morphology, regulate eater resources and develop agricultural activities. On the global scale, although research has underscored their vital role across a variety of environmental settings, several scientific aspects remain unexplored: i) suitable planning and design of restoration actions (such as check dam design); ii) prediction of degradation and functioning over time; iii) quantification of the effectiveness of actions as a function of their desired purposes; iv) assessment of their effectiveness after extreme hydrological events (e.g., water floods, debris floods and flows, deforestation). Pursuing these scientific objectives is further complicated by the scarcity of long-term monitoring studies. In this regard, Remote sensing (RS) opens new horizons to analyse past and current situations as well as makes monitoring the evolution of the regulated catchment morphology possible by multi-temporal surveys at different scales and open-source big data.
This session offers a platform for collaboration and discussion among soil scientists, hydrologists, geomorphologists, and stakeholders, facilitating a dialogue on critical issues about planning, design, and management torrent control works and soil conservation techniques at the catchment scale. Researches about the following topics are welcome: i) innovative protocols and guidelines for planning and design; ii) emerging techniques for multi-temporal or real-time monitoring of effects using RS techniques; iii) standards for comprehensive analysis of structural and functioning conditions as well as impacts on natural dynamics of torrents and their catchments; iv) identification of new challenges (i.e., soil-bioengineering techniques and integration of living vegetation in check dam systems).
Early career scientists are encouraged to contribute to the session with original and advanced studies.

Quantitative information on the spatial patterns of soil redistribution during storms and on the sources supplying sediment to rivers is essential for advancing our understanding of the processes that control sediment transfer and for designing effective sediment management strategies. It is also crucial to quantify the residence times of material moving along the sediment cascade and to reconstruct changes in sediment sources across a range of temporal scales. These needs are becoming increasingly urgent in light of intensified climate- and land use-driven impacts on erosion, sediment delivery, and sediment-related pollution affecting freshwater and marine environments. Over recent decades, sediment tracing (or fingerprinting) techniques, used alone or in combination with other approaches (including soil erosion modelling and sediment budgeting), have provided valuable insights to understand sediment source dynamics. Yet, their widespread application remains constrained by several methodological and conceptual challenges that the research community should address. We welcome contributions that address any of the following aspects:
• Developments of innovative field measurement and sediment sampling techniques;
• Advances in the accuracy and robustness of soil and sediment tracing techniques for quantifying soil erosion and redistribution;
• Sediment source tracing studies using conventional (e.g. elemental/isotopic geochemistry, fallout radionuclides, organic matter) or alternative (e.g. colour, infrared, hyperspectral, particle morphometry, eDNA) properties;
• Investigation of particle-bound contaminant transfers in catchments and river systems using sediment tracing techniques;
• Investigations of the current limitations in sediment tracing studies (e.g. tracer selection, tracer conservativeness, uncertainty analysis, particle size and organic matter corrections);
• Applications of radioisotope tracers to quantify sediment transit times over a broad range of timescales (from the flood to the century);
• Association of conventional techniques with remote sensing and emerging technologies (e.g. LiDAR, satellite);
• Cross-regional and multi-scale applications of tracing techniques to establish generic characterisations of source contributions;
• Integrated approaches to developing catchment sediment budgets: combining different measurement techniques, monitoring, and/or models to improve our understanding of sediment delivery processes.

Over the past decades, the evolution of instrumental and analytical methods has significantly transformed how we study soils. Progress in pedology and paleopedology has consistently benefited from integrating well-established theoretical frameworks with emerging technological advances. Classical approaches of pedology, when combined with innovative analytical and computational tools particularly those dealing with undisturbed profiles or samples, now allow for more holistic understanding of the soil mantle and the spatial regularities in the distribution of soil diversity, as well as of the soil architecture and the soil-forming processes that contributed to its development over time, with particular attention to the geochronology of these processes and the associated environmental changes. Advances in techniques such as isotope geochemistry, bio- and geochemical proxies, high-resolution imaging, and holistic analytical methods have opened new frontiers in both pedology and paleopedology. We welcome contributions that showcase innovative research on soil properties, genesis, evolution and soil diversity in both contemporary and ancient, native and human-impacted contexts, including geoarchaeological settings, across scales from microscopic to landscape levels.

With the awareness that fundamental pedological knowledge underpins solutions to global challenges —such as climate change, land degradation, and sustainable land use we invite submissions in applied pedology, including soil micromorphology that offer practical insights for environmental management and ecosystem sustainability.

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.

Human activity became a major player of global climatic and environmental change in the course of the late Quaternary, during the Anthropocene. Consequently, it is crucial to understand these changes through the study of former human-environmental interactions at different spatial and temporal scales. Documenting the diversity of human responses and adaptations to climate, landscapes, ecosystems, natural disasters and the changing natural resources availability in different regions of our planet, provides valuable opportunities to learn from the past. To do so, cross-disciplinary studies in Geoarchaeology offer a chance to better understand the archaeological records and landscapes in context of human culture and the hydroclimate-environment nexus over time. This session seeks related interdisciplinary papers and specific geoarchaeological case-studies that deploy various approaches and tools to address the reconstruction of former human-environmental interactions from the Palaeolithic period through the modern. Topics related to records of the Anthropocene from Earth and archaeological science perspectives are welcome. Furthermore, contributions may include (but are not limited to) insights about how people have coped with environmental disasters or abrupt changes in the past; defining sustainability thresholds for farming or resource exploitation; distinguishing the baseline natural and human contributions to environmental changes. Ultimately, we would like to understand how strategies of human resilience and innovation can inform our modern policies for addressing the challenges of the emerging Anthropocene, a time frame dominated by human modulation of surface geomorphological processes and hydroclimate.

Currently arid to sub-humid regions are home to >40% of the world’s population, and many prehistoric and historic cultures developed in these regions. Due to the high sensitivity of drylands to also small-scale environmental changes and anthropogenic activities, ongoing geomorphological processes under the intensified climatic and human pressure of the Anthropocene, but also the Late Quaternary geomorphological and paleoenvironmental evolution as recorded in sediment archives, are becoming increasingly relevant for geological, geomorphological, paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic and geoarchaeological research. Dryland research is constantly boosted by methodological advances, and especially by emerging linkages with other climatic and geomorphic systems that allow using dryland areas as indicator-regions of global environmental changes.
This session aims to pool contributions dealing with past to recent geomorphological processes and environmental changes spanning the entire Quaternary until today, as well as with all types of sedimentary and morphological archives in dryland areas (dunes, loess, slope deposits, fluvial sediments, alluvial fans, lake and playa sediments, desert pavements, soils, palaeosols etc.) studied on different spatial and temporal scales. Besides case studies on archives and landscapes from individual regions and review studies, cross-disciplinary, methodical and conceptual contributions are especially welcome in this session, e.g., dealing with the special role of aeolian, fluvial, gravitational and biological processes in dryland environments and their preservation in deposits and landforms, the role of such processes for past and present societies, methods to obtain chronological frameworks and process rates, and emerging geo-technologies.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Soil is more than a conglomerate of mineral particles held together by organic matter and surrounded by water and air. It is an important habitat, known to harbour an immense part of planetary biodiversity. This diversity of life within the soil is what makes it the basis of human life, as it plays an important role in maintaining soil health, through defining soil properties and nutrient cycling dynamics. From soil micro-, meso-, and to macrofauna, soil life is teeming, though increasingly pressured by global threats, such as soil erosion, soil pollution (e.g. pesticides, heavy metals, microplastics), and climate change. The problem is of high urgency for the EU, where about a third of the soils are characterized by threatened biological functioning according to the EUSO soil degradation dashboard. Thus, it is very timely to improve our limited understanding of the complexities surrounding soil biodiversity and its interrelationships with cultivation patterns, global changes, and other pressures.
The aim of the session is to bring together research on soil fauna, its diversity and role in soil processes, and potential strategies to mitigate the impact of various stressors on soil fauna.

In this session we welcome any and all studies about soil fauna and its diversity. Studies with a solution-oriented approach to explore opportunities for safeguarding and promoting soil fauna in the future are especially welcome.

Microbial life, activities and processes in soil are distributed extremely heterogeneously in space and time, always limited by many factors, especially by available organics. In short periods – the hot moments – the factors limiting microbial activities are ceased, and life thrives. Such hotspots are common in the rhizosphere, detritusphere, drilosphere, and on biogeochemical interfaces.
This session challenges to identify microbial groups, transformations and mechanisms responsible for carbon and nutrient cycling in such hotspots, to link them with soil structure and pore architecture, and to assess the key ecological processes ongoing during hot moments but having long-lasting effects on soil properties and functions.
We invite lab, microcosm and field studies that explore, visualize and explain the drivers and mechanisms of processes in hotspots at all scales during hot moments. In situ, in vivo and in silico studies as well as innovative concepts are very welcome to discuss how soil life and microbial death needs to be at the right time and right place to make a footprint relevant at larger ecological scales.

Soil is a highly dynamic environment where plants and microorganisms jointly participate in key biogeochemical cycles. At the root–soil interface—the rhizosphere—roots release a variety of organic compounds that shape microbial communities, influence soil structure, and drive nutrient and carbon fluxes. Other soil domains such as the detritusphere, biopores, and aggregates provide diverse physical and chemical conditions that further control these interactions.
Despite significant progress, it remains challenging to connect processes occurring at very small scales—such as molecular exchanges or microbial activity around root hairs—with larger-scale outcomes at the level of root systems or soil profiles. Overcoming this gap is essential for understanding how plant–microbial interactions contribute to soil carbon stabilization, nutrient availability, plant health, and ecosystem resilience.
We welcome experimental and modelling studies that investigate:
- Spatial and temporal gradients in microbial diversity and functions along root systems and soil interfaces.
- The influence of root exudates, decomposition products, and soil structure on microbial activity and nutrient cycling.
- Feedbacks between plant growth, microbial processes, and soil physical properties.
- Methodological advances such as high-resolution imaging, isotopic tracing, multi-omics, and microfluidic systems for studying soil microhabitats.
- Modelling approaches that integrate micro-scale processes with field-scale or ecosystem-scale dynamics.
By integrating knowledge from plant physiology, soil microbiology, biogeochemistry, and soil physics, this session aims to advance a mechanistic understanding of how plant–microbial–soil interactions shape ecosystem functioning under changing environmental conditions.

Soils host by far most biodiversity on our planet. This soil biodiversity is essential for other life forms on Earth: plants as holobionts utterly depend on soil microbes to thrive, while other soil organisms drive nutrient cycles from micro to global scales. Not surprisingly, soil biodiversity has become a ‘hot topic’ in science, as shown in a disproportional rise in high-quality publications, and also has been raising political interest, such as shown by the EU soil monitoring law. We now increasingly understand the diversity, composition and even functional profiles of many soil taxa. Agricultural practices and emerging pollutants may threaten this soil biodiversity, making it an important research field to explore and keep soils healthy. Many methodological frontiers emerge that might help understand and enhance soil biodiversity.

In this session, we aim to highlight potential threats to soil biodiversity and will discuss (methodological) frontiers that improve our understanding on soil biodiversity and soil functioning. We specifically welcome soil biodiversity-linked submissions focusing on agriculture, pollutants like microplastics, antibiotics or anthelminthics. We also welcome new methodological and experimental approaches that help to uncover the biodiversity and functioning of life in soil.

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

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.

Soil inorganic carbon (SIC) is an important and slow cycling stock of C in soils, but has been understudied relative to soil organic carbon (SOC). Soil studies have tended to avoid calcareous soils as they complicate measurement of SOC, but by avoiding them, soil scientists are overlooking ~30 % of global soils and the complex biogeochemical interactions that arise within them. It is well established that SIC can strongly influence soil chemical, physical, and biological properties, and evidence is beginning to highlight its vulnerability to global change or agricultural practices. We call a new session to discuss insights into calcareous soil (agro-)systems, the SIC cycle, and its interactions with SOC. We welcome studies at pluri-metric scales ranging from global-scale modelling studies, dryland ecosystems and watersheds, down to pedon-scale, micro-, or molecular-scale analyses investigating SIC and its effects on soil biogeochemistry. This includes studies on both primary and secondary carbonate forms, its influence on different elemental cycles, and the role of both abiotic and biotic formation processes. Studies are encouraged that aim to understand the role of SIC in soil processes, systems, and health, the influence of mineral-addition on soil biogeochemistry (such as liming or enhanced rock weathering), or the effects of future change and management practices (such as fertilisation or irrigation) on SIC.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) and inorganic carbon (SIC) are fundamental to the maintenance of the ecosystem services provided by soils. SOC is dynamic and reactive, resulting in a complex array of interactions between it and the soil mineral phase or metal species. These dynamic interactions are ultimately linked to the persistence and accumulation of SOC across scales ranging from micro- to global scale. This session is dedicated to studies investigating the dynamic interactions, underlying mechanisms, and implications of organo-mineral and organo-metal interactions at different scales. It includes studies on the quality, type, and sources of SOC (e.g. plant, rhizosphere, microbial, pyrogenic), its storage within aggregates, and its association with mineral surfaces or metals across all pedoclimatic settings and their responses to management practices. We welcome studies that investigate both SOC, SIC, and their interactions utilizing a broad range of analytical techniques including field, laboratory, modelling, and spectroscopic approaches. We put emphasis on contributions addressing the biogeochemical effects of different mineral amendments such as rock (e.g. silicate-rich rock) powder on both the inorganic and organic carbon cycle of soils. This session thus aims to enhance our mechanistic understanding of the interactions between soil carbon and minerals at different weathering stages or metal species across scales in all pedoclimatic settings.

Minerals are essential players in soils, serving as dynamic interfaces for the exchange of matter and energy between the liquid, gaseous, and solid phase. Their properties across scales—ranging from crystallographic characteristics and the availability of reactive sites to the spatial arrangement in aggregates—determine the reactivity of the soil solid phase. Thus, mineral properties control key soil functions, such as the retention or release of organic carbon, nutrients, and contaminants. Minerals shape habitats for soil organisms of all kingdoms and thereby regulate aboveground productivity. Understanding these interdependencies requires collaborative, interdisciplinary effort. This session explores the diverse and dynamic world of inorganic solids in soils, with a particular focus on mineralogical influences on abiotic and biological soil processes, including, but not limited to, mineral transformations, soil structure formation, organic matter cycling, and nutrient dynamics.
We invite contributions addressing both “classical” clay minerals and more “exotic” phases, such as manganates or layered double hydroxides. Interdisciplinary and methodological studies as well as work by early-career researchers are especially welcome. We aim to provide a collaborative forum where mineralogists, soil scientists, biogeochemists, and ecologists can deepen the understanding of mineral-structure–function relationships, nutrient cycling, and soil responses to dynamic environmental challenges.

Soils represent a major terrestrial store of both organic and inorganic carbon. At present soils are a net carbon sink, and building soil carbon stocks holds a potential to contribute to achieving net zero carbon. Furthermore, the accrual, stability, and cycling of carbon is fundamental to the productivity and resilience of soil systems, and preserving or even increasing soil carbon stocks is critical for allowing sustainable agricultural crop production.

Avenues for organic carbon sequestration in soils include plant-based inputs, the addition of pyrogenic carbon (biochar), and addition of composts or other additives such as manures and soil conditioners provided additionality and leakage effects are considered. Enhanced silicate weathering may hold significant potential for building up inorganic carbon stocks, while inputs from bedrock, and mediation by land use changes such as afforestation, may also increase inorganic soil carbon stocks.

This session seeks to explore how soil carbon stocks can be increased so as to simultaneously enhance agricultural productivity, mitigate negative repercussions of changing environmental conditions, and contribute to achieving carbon neutrality. Alongside this, advances in methods for monitoring and modelling rates of soil carbon loss or carbon sequestration in soils are key to inform political, agronomical, and geo-engineering approaches. We welcome contributions exploring methods of increasing both organic and inorganic carbon stocks, and studies exploring the storage, stability, and cycling of carbon within soil systems. Early career researchers are strongly encouraged to apply, and we seek submissions considering empirical, modelling, or meta-analytical approaches.

Regulation of the cycles of carbon (C) and nutrients (N, P, S) in soils and ensuring their linkage and retention are recognized as major challenges, especially under shifts in environmental factors (warming, drought, N deposition, overfertilization, salinization, alterations of landscapes, biodiversity loss, invasion of species and intensification of land use). The processes underlying C and nutrient cycling in soils are difficult to evaluate and separate since multiple factors can shift process rates and directions and determine pool sizes. Factors also frequently have an interactive effect. Estimating the magnitude of C and nutrient pool response and the temporal scale of reactions to land use change or shifts of environmental factors remains a significant challenge. Thus, this session invites contributions focused on evaluating the soil C, N, P, and S pools and process responses under global change scenarios at the local and large scales. Studies that combine short-term laboratory observation focused on process rate estimation with long-term field experiments and evaluation of pools are highly welcome. Studies that focus on the effect of soil chemistry, including an application of isotopes to investigate the process rates, mineralogy, and the transition from conventional to organic agriculture/land restoration, are also highly relevant.

Enhanced Weathering (EW)—the application of crushed silicate rocks to soils and terrestrial waters—has emerged as a promising nature-based solution for atmospheric carbon removal, with estimates suggesting the potential of gigatons of CO₂ removal annually. Yet, significant uncertainties remain around EW, from dissolution kinetics in soils to the transport, transformation, and fate of weathering products in soil and freshwater systems.
This session invites contributions that tackle these uncertainties through theoretical and observational approaches. We particularly encourage cross-disciplinary work that explores not only the carbon removal potential of EW, but also its environmental co-benefits, possible risks, and applications in under-studied regions. By bringing together diverse perspectives, the session seeks to advance a more comprehensive understanding of EW and its role in achieving scalable and safe climate mitigation.

Soils are the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir, and enhancing the long-term persistence of soil organic matter (SOM) is a key strategy for mitigating atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. Yet, the mechanisms that govern SOM stabilization—and the interventions that might enhance it—remain among the most complex and debated challenges in soil science.
Recent advances have deepened our understanding of SOM fractionation and protection mechanisms, particularly the role of mineral-associated organic matter (MAOM), particulate organic matter (POM), and occluded POM (oPOM). Insights into the biotic and abiotic pathways leading to MAOM formation have expanded significantly, alongside the development of new-generation soil models that incorporate these processes into SOM turnover estimates.
At the same time, emerging evidence underscores the complex and context-dependent nature of the soil mineral–microbe–vegetation interface. In particular, studies beyond temperate systems reveal that organo-mineral interactions are more dynamic than previously assumed, and that POM can persist for centuries in certain ecosystems or soil horizons. These findings challenge conventional assumptions and highlight the need for tailored management strategies.
This session invites contributions that explore SOM dynamics across scales—from molecular mechanisms and microbial processes to ecosystem-level patterns and global models. We welcome studies that introduce novel insights, challenge established paradigms, or provide robust confirmations of existing theories. Whether your work is based on field observations, laboratory experiments, or computational modeling, we are eager to hear how it advances our understanding of SOM persistence and informs practical applications, from land management to climate policy.
We particularly encourage early career scientists to participate, including those with preliminary findings or innovative conceptual approaches. If your research touches on any aspect of SOM formation, transformation, or stabilization, join us for a lively and interdisciplinary discussion.

Soils are among the main terrestrial reservoirs of carbon (C) and nutrients (NPK), playing a crucial role in sustaining food production and ecosystem balance. The accumulation, stability, and circulation of soil organic C (SOC) and nutrients are essential for maintaining agricultural productivity and soil system resilience.
Agricultural management practices such as incorporating plant residues, applying organic amendments, adopting no-till farming or using cover crops are widely known to positively influence SOC and nutrient dynamics. In operational contexts, tools that assess the impact of agricultural practices on SOC and nutrient dynamics, such as carbon models (e.g., RothC) and crop process-based models (e.g., DSSAT, STICS), among others, are highly relevant for planning and adopting agricultural practices that improve and conserve SOC and nutrients.

In this context, we warmly invite researchers interested in these topics to participate. We particularly welcome contributions on the following:
i) Studies quantifying degradation, mineralization, stabilization, and nutrient release from crop residues and organic amendments to better model SOC and nutrient dynamics;
ii) Research assessing SOC and nutrient dynamics across different pedoclimatic conditions at farm or field scales, to improve recommendations for precision agriculture;
iii) Research on agricultural practices in experimental and field studies that improve soil fertility by linking SOC and nutrients with physical, chemical and biological properties and with soil health and associated (directly or indirectly) processes as soil erosion or soil compaction.

Soil systems harbor a highly diverse spatial organization of its functions shaping biogeochemical matter cycles. From microbial microenvironments via physical soil structure and various chemical differentiation by pedogenetic or anthropogenic processes up to the landscape scale. In this session, we invite diverse studies that open our views on the spatial heterogeneity in soils from biological, physical, and chemical perspectives related to organic matter dynamics.

We look forward to discuss insights across different scale and structures. Zooming in provides the opportunity to observe microbial habitats and processes, probe highly active spheres around roots or detritus, and follow the interactions of organic matter with mineral phases. Aggregated structures and a network of soil pores provides a dynamic scaffolding, which can protect soil components and influence local water retention and elemental distribution. Pedogenetic soil processes drive the differentiation at pedon scale and can result from a combination of small-scale processes determining soil ecosystem fluxes up to the landscape scale.

This session is of interest to soil scientists with complementary biogeochemical and physical backgrounds working at different scales. We especially encourage contributions that address the importance of spatial heterogeneity and architecture for ecosystem-relevant soil functions, such as the occlusion of organic residues, microbial colonization, provision of water and nutrients, and many more. Different experimental imaging approaches, analytical techniques and data-driven modelling works are invited. We aim to discuss recent achievements, current obstacles, and future research directions to strengthen our conceptual understanding of the linkage of spatial heterogeneity with soil functions and organic matter dynamics across scales.

Soil organic matter (SOM) is well known to exert a great influence on physical, chemical, and biological soil properties, thus playing a very important role in agronomic production and environmental quality. Globally SOM represents the largest terrestrial organic C stock, which can have significant impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and thus on climate. The changes in soil organic C content are the result of the balance of inputs and losses, which strongly depends on the processes of organic C stabilization and protection from decomposition in the soil. This session will provide a forum for discussion of recent studies on the transformation, stabilization and sequestration mechanisms of organic C in soils, covering any physical, chemical, and biological aspects related to the selective preservation and formation of recalcitrant organic compounds, occlusion by macro and microaggregation, and chemical interaction with soil mineral particles and metal ions.

This session explores cutting-edge research on organo-mineral interactions critical to nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, and soil health. We emphasize how future climate variability, particularly drought and intense rainfall will reshape organo-mineral interactions across soil environments. We invite contributions that explore the dynamic nature of these mineral-organic associations, especially within the rhizosphere and redox-active environments, and their response to biotic and abiotic drivers under changing climatic conditions (e.g., vegetation dynamics, soil moisture, snow cover, ...).
Contributions integrating experimental, modeling, and advanced analytical approaches to elucidate the roles of microbial and abiotic processes in organo-mineral interactions are welcome. The session seeks interdisciplinary studies that improve mechanistic understanding and predictive capacity of soil biogeochemical responses to climate change.

Soils are one of the largest terrestrial sinks for organic carbon, and therefore present a promising opportunity to mitigate climate change. Over the past decade, many global initiatives have been launched to enhance soils’ capacity to sequester and store organic carbon. A noteworthy example is the ‘4 per mille’ scheme, launched at the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015. This initiative proposed that annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning could be offset if the global stock of soil organic carbon was increased annually at the rate of 4 parts per 1000. A decade has elapsed since this initiative was launched, and a debate ensues about the extent to which soils have the capacity to endlessly increase their carbon storage. In this session, we will showcase research that interrogates both arguments of the ‘carbon saturation threshold’ debate. Is there a threshold above which a soil profile can no longer increase its carbon storage? If so, what is this threshold, and what are the implications for both land management and our Net Zero Carbon targets? What are the mechanisms determining differences between soils’ soil carbon saturation thresholds, and over what timescales may saturation limit the capacity of soils to mitigate climate change? We welcome empirical work, model-based efforts, or desk-based reviews. Early career researchers are strongly encouraged to apply.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Soil and vadose zone processes, including water, energy, and solute transport, occur over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, from pores to watersheds. A key challenge in vadose zone hydrology is understanding how small-scale processes control and constrain large-scale system responses. Environmental variability and human activities shape soils’ physical, chemical, mechanical, and hydraulic properties, from saturated wetlands and coastal zones to arid and semi-arid landscapes.
This session focuses on the measurement and modeling of soil properties and processes across landscapes, from the pore scale to the field or watershed scale. Organized in collaboration with the International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC), the session invites contributions that:
• Measure soil physical and chemical properties in the lab, field, or watershed using tools such as micro-scale imaging, in-situ soil sensors, drones, geophysical methods, radars, and remote sensing platforms.
• Model soil processes using analytical, empirical, statistical, or numerical approaches that link processes across scales, including upscaling and downscaling strategies to address heterogeneity in infiltration, evaporation, salinity dynamics, gas transport, and subsurface mass and energy fluxes.
• Investigate spatiotemporal changes in vadose zone properties at different scales through measurement or modeling campaigns, focusing on natural variability or human-driven changes such as climate variability, sea level rise and salinity intrusion, droughts, freeze-thaw cycles, heavy agricultural machinery impacts, and land management practices in forests, agricultural fields, wetlands, coastal zones, grasslands, deserts, urban soils, and mountainous regions.

This session offers a multidisciplinary view of soil processes, bridging classical soil physics with geophysical monitoring. It will explore the combination of traditional tools—such as infiltrometers, water retention and continuous soil moisture sensing measurements—with geophysical techniques including electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), self-potential (SP), seismic surveys, ground-penetrating radar (GPR). By linking observations from the microscopic pore level to the broader landscape, this session highlights how integrated methods reveal the hidden dynamics that sustain ecosystems.

Topics of interest include:
- Soil compaction, cracking, sealing, and preferential flow
- Vadose zone processes, layering, and root–soil interactions
- Microbial activity, soil respiration, and carbon cycling
- Integration of field measurements, laboratory experiments, and modeling (SIP, ...)

This session aims to foster discussion and collaboration on innovative approaches to monitor, understand, and predict soil and Critical Zone dynamics under environmental and climatic change.

Recent developments in Earth observation, data science, and computational modeling are revolutionizing our understanding of soil physics processes. The goal of this session is to bring together researchers who utilize a combination of remote sensing data, artificial intelligence (AI), and process-based models for better understanding soil properties and hydrological behavior, as well as for their interactions with the atmosphere. Contributions. We invite submissions on the following (but not restricted to) topics:
• Application of multi-scale remote sensing (satellite, aircraft, drones, proximal sensing) for soil physical properties estimation, process monitoring, and spatial variability of soil conditions (moisture, texture, compaction, salinity, erosion) mapping across scales.
• Uses of machine learning and AI methods to combine with mechanistic/process-based models.
• Data assimilation, (Bayesian) inverse modeling, data fusion techniques, and data-driven models for monitoring soil conditions (moisture, texture, compaction, salinity, erosion), soil hydraulic properties, and soil–plant–atmosphere interactions across scales.
• Quantifying uncertainties and error propagation in coupled soil physics models and remote sensing products.
• Case studies that illustrate the use of these methods for climate impact assessments, sustainable land management, and hydrological prediction.
This session will bridge the traditional concepts in soil physics and the advancing technologies (e.g., remote sensing, data analytics, and modeling) to bring soil scientists and remote sensing researchers into an interdisciplinary discussion. Young and early-career researchers, as well as interdisciplinary researchers, are especially invited to submit their contributions.

Soil structure and its stability determine soil physical and chemical functions such as water retention, water and air transport, macropore flow, mechanical impedance, matter transport, nutrient leaching, redox potentials, and soil erosion protection. These soil physical and chemical characteristics are fundamental for biological processes, such as root penetration, organic matter turnover and nutrient dynamics. The soil pore network determines soil aeration, a large part of the soil hydrological regime and forms the habitat for soil biota, which in turn actively reshape the soil pore network. Soil biota, root growth, land management practices and abiotic drivers lead to a constant evolution of the arrangement of pores, minerals and organic matter. Thus, soil properties and functions are always changing, especially in managed agricultural and forestry lands.
In such lands, anthropogenic soil compaction is one of the main soil degradation processes which can lead to a long-term loss of soil structure. Steadily increasing weight of machinery and their intensive use increase the risk of harmful soil compaction, especially under unfavourable soil conditions. The effects of soil compaction on soil structure and processes, especially in deeper layers are often almost invisible, while recovery of soil structure of those layers is a grand challenge.
The importance of the interaction between soil structure on one side and soil compaction, soil management and soil biology on the other, is highlighted by recent research outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms and factors controlling soil functions is a prerequisite for climate smart farming systems. This is crucial for achieving yield and food security on a sustainable way, as well as preserving the systems’ resilience to extreme weather events due to climate change.

In this session, we invite contributions on the formation and alteration of soil structure and its associated soil functions at all spatial and temporal scales. Special focus lies on feedbacks between soil structure dynamics and soil biology as well as the impact of mechanical stress exerted by heavy vehicles deployed under land management operations. Further, we encourage submissions that integrate complementary measurement techniques, aim at bridging different scales or study solutions for reducing soil compaction and improving soil structure.

Soil is a dynamic porous media in which its structure plays a key role in controlling soil functionality. As many functions are related to the transport and storage of fluids, we often focus our research in soil physics on the pore space itself ignoring the infrastructure and stability of the grain network. In this session we would like to take a look at the mechanical properties and processes that lead to soil structure formation, stabilisation and degradation on various scales ranging from interparticle to bulk- or pedon-scale including the assessment of mechanical soil properties on field to regional-scale. We are looking for contributions addressing topics like:

- Root/fauna-soil bioturbation mechanical processes and the energic inputs required to generate biopore spaces/structures
- Stabilising mechanisms in the rhizosphere and mechanical reinforcement of soil by root networks
- The role of pore water pressures and matric potential on soil deformation
- Mineral (grain-grain) / organic-mineral interactions and how they are controlled by the chemistry of pore water and surface charges
- Soil compaction assessment in forestry (skidding tracks) and agricultural soil management including new approaches to model/estimate spatial distribution of (sub)soil compaction
- Modern and emerging techniques like rheometry, digital image correlation, diffraction stress measurements, aggregation and deformation modelling as well as geophysical approaches to assess soil compaction from the profile to the field scale.

This session offers an opportunity to present studies or professional works regarding irrigated agriculture, either with disciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches, to provide solutions for the society's challenges in the XXI century, in the following areas:
• The resilience of irrigated areas at different spatial scales, mainly when water and soil are limiting factors.
• Estimation of crop transpiration/crop water requirement, even considering the possibility to apply regulated water deficit conditions.
• Coupling natural and human systems where ground and surface water and land are limiting resources for irrigation
• Safety in marginal water use in irrigated agriculture. Use of irrigation water from different non-conventional water sources
• Traditional, novel, and transitional technologies for irrigation management, control and practical application.
• Digital irrigation: application of available remote and proximal sensed data to tackle current and future irrigation problems.
• Improving the integration of climate change scenarios and weather forecasts into agro-hydrological models and decision support systems to improve decisions in irrigation management and safe surface water-groundwater interactions.
Posters and oral communications are available. Likewise, a Special Issue is foreseen.

Life in soil modifies its physical environment to optimize growth and reproductive conditions. Especially in hotspots of biological activity, soil organisms induce remarkable alterations in soil structure and functions. Elucidating the underlying mechanisms forcing such adaptive modifications, and exploring the feedbacks between the drivers, offers an exceptional opportunity to advance our understanding of fundamental physical and biological processes across scales.
We seek contributions linking biological processes and soil physics at any spatial and temporal scale. For example, insights into how the rhizosphere and its microbiome control fluxes beyond the pore scale; on the role of biological soil crust in regulating infiltration and limiting soil erosion across vast areas of the earth’s surface; on how bioturbation shapes soil hydraulic characteristics over years and decades.

Topics of the Soil Biophysics session include but are not limited to:
1. Root growth
2. Microbial activity
3. Bioturbation
4. Virus dispersal
5. Resource allocation
6. Soil water dynamics
7. Soil structure formation
8. Biological soil crusts
9. Rhizosphere interactions
10. EPS (incl. mucilage)

The aim of this session is to highlight the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to address current and future challenges in soil science and to foster scientific exchange across disciplines.

Soils play a crucial role in sustaining agro-system productivity and providing numerous ecosystem services essential for sustainable land and water management. The management of both soil and water resources is a primary socio-economic concern that requires a detailed understanding of the physical and biological processes occurring within the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. However, measuring soil state variables and hydraulic parameters is often challenging due to the complex, nonlinear physical, chemical, and biological interactions that simultaneously control the transfer of heat and mass (water and solutes). Infiltration experiments have been proposed as a simple means to estimate soil hydraulic properties, but their effectiveness is limited by spatio-temporal variability across scales. High-resolution measurements of soil state variables, both in space and time, are therefore essential to adequately describe and analyze soil hydraulic properties and to understand flow processes, including phenomena such as preferential flows.

The session focuses on the principles, methods, and applications of various techniques and their associated mathematical frameworks for monitoring key soil variables, estimating soil hydraulic properties, and accounting for preferential flows. Specific topics include, but are not limited to:

• Multiple measurement techniques and modelling approaches for determining state variables of soil;
• Innovative soil-water measurements techniques for linking the interactions of soil with plant and atmosphere compartments;
• Laboratory and field infiltration techniques from a wide variety of devices;
• Understanding the effect of physical processes and geochemical processes on the dynamics of macropore-fracture and preferential flows across scales;
• Understanding the contribution of preferential flow to flow and mass transport in the vadose zone;
• New or revisited numerical and analytical models to account for physical, chemical and biological interactions in the soil-water flow models (multiple-porosity, permeability, hydrophobicity, clogging, shrinking-swelling, or biofilm development);
• Use of pedotransfer functions based on limited available in-situ measurements to estimate parameters that describe soil hydro-physical and thermal characteristics;
• Multi-data source methodologies also in combination with modelling for assessing the soil physics dynamics at different temporal and spatial scales.

It is known that soil water flow has two main types, i.e., preferential flow and soil matrix flow. These two behaviors show two contrary effects on soil infiltration, which in further take part in the regulation of soil hydrology. The spatial distribution of preferential flow and soil matrix flow at the soil profiles is extremely heterogeneous, and, could be affected by root systems.
Root systems, as an important component within the soils, could support plants to absorb water and nutrients. So, more water could return to the atmosphere through the transpiration.
However, we must also realize that more complex macropores (especially root channels themselves) could form during root growth. On the one hand, those pores could promote the loss of water and nutrients by preferential flow, which could result in inefficient water use and weaker soil and water conservation. On the other hand, the increasing complex of the pores at the root-soil interface indicates a large interfacial area between soil pores and the surrounding soil matrix, allowing more water infiltration into the matrix.
Based on this contradiction, we need to reconsider the dual function of root systems in balancing water flow in soil, i.e., when root systems promote water flow, and when they restrict it.
Therefore: When do root systems promote water flow by facilitating preferential flow, or when do they restrict water flow by facilitating soil matrix flow? How do different root system types influence this? Is the threshold for this effect different across vegetation types? These questions should be discussed as follows.
Using high-tech techniques (e.g., X-ray CT) to quantify the spatio-temporal distribution of different soil water flow behavior under the regulation of root systems.
- Discussing the mechanism or new hydrological model about root induced soil water flow (preferential flow or soil matrix flow) under different conditions.
- Linking root systems traits (architectural or biological, living roots or dead roots) to the soil water flow characteristics.
- Detecting the transfer between root-induced preferential flow and soil matrix flow using process-based hydrological models or machine learning.
- Exploring the profound effects of root systems on soil water flow from macroscales, such as watershed hydrology, groundwater allocation, atmospheric water cycle, and so on.

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

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

Landslides and slope instabilities represent significant global hazards, causing substantial damage and loss of life annually. Despite this impact, the fundamental triggering mechanisms remain a key area of ongoing research. Landslide-prone areas and slope instabilities are characterized by complex, heterogeneous subsurface properties and dynamic processes operating across a wide range of timescales – from seconds to decades – and spatial scales – from grain size to slope dimensions. Effectively identifying and predicting instability processes and ultimately failure requires innovative approaches that account for these wide temporal and spatial variabilities.

This session seeks contributions presenting novel methods,emerging trends, and case studies in landslide and slope instability reconnaissance, monitoring, and early warning. We particularly encourage submissions showcasing the integration of geophysical, geotechnical, geological, and remote sensing data to build a landslide model able to characterize the landslide architecture and track its evolution.

We especially invite abstracts demonstrating:

• Multi-method approaches combining geophysical, geotechnical, and remote sensing techniques.
• Applications of machine learning to landslide hazard assessment and prediction.
• Time-lapse geophysical surveys for monitoring subsurface changes.
• Determination of geomechanical parameters through integrated geological (e.g., borehole data, geotechnical surveys) and geophysical studies.

Recognizing the cross-disciplinary nature of this challenge, we welcome contributions addressing a broad range of slope instability types, including avalanches, natural and engineered slopes, and climate-induced failures.

The continuum approach is a classical framework to describe and understand the soil—water dynamics and the soil effective—stress state in unsaturated soils. This approach is robustly rooted in the definition of the soil—water constitutive laws (soil—water retention curve, soil hydraulic conductivity, Kirchhoff potential, etc.). They link the real soil and its model. Advancements along their development and the comprehension of their role stand at the intersection of experimental measurements, mathematical representation and modelling, numerical solutions, theoretical understandings and practical applications.

This session aims at stimulating an interdisciplinary discussion about the state of the art and recent advances about soil—water constitutive laws and soil physical and hydrological properties, in the framework of a continuum approach and contributing to define its limits.

Experimental, theoretical and numerical contributions are encouraged about, but not limited to, (1) scaling of soil—water constitutive laws and their changes in time and space as a consequence of seasonality, climatic changes, anthropogenic changes and pedogenesis; (2) physics of water—repellent soils, and of swelling, dispersive and collapsible soils; (3) constitutive laws for extremely dry conditions and for nearly saturated soils; (4) nonequilibrium and hysteretic behaviours; (5) limits of the Darcian approach in the presence of macroporosity; (6) heat transfer and dispersion; (7) freezing and thawing processes in permafrost; (8) mechanisms of incipient erosion; (9) mathematical functions of constitutive laws and their physical implications; (10) pedotransfer functions and database analysis.

Advancements along those lines will have major implications in many fields, ranging from hydrology, to soil science and soil physics, agriculture and geotechnics.

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

The proper management of blue and green water is vital for sustainable livelihoods and agricultural practices around the world. This is especially true in drylands, where any productive activity is deeply related to the understanding of soil hydrological behaviour, and irrigation is both a pillar of agroecosystems and a defence against desertification, but also in temperate or humid lands which can experience variations in the hydrological cycle and be prone to water scarcity due to climate change.
Improper practices, which are not able to cope with climate-induced variability and anomalies, may in fact contribute to soil degradation and depletion of the available water sources. For example, incorrect irrigation techniques may lead to soil salinization and groundwater depletion or salinization, with dramatic fallout on agricultural productivity. Irrigation efficiency improvements could paradoxically lead to increasing water consumption and water scarcity conditions through irrigation expansion and complex socio-hydrological dynamics. Finally, overgrazing may lead to exploitation of vegetation cover, soil compaction, and adverse effects on the soil capability of water buffering. It is thus clear that the role of irrigation goes beyond the technological aspects, as proved by traditional irrigation being a cultural heritage which is often structurally resilient, and which needs to be faced with an interdisciplinary approach involving humanities.

This session welcomes contributions with a specific focus on:
• The understanding of soil hydrological behaviour, of mass fluxes through the soil and of the related sociohydrological dynamics in drylands and environments under actual or projected stress conditions (e.g. water shortage, compaction, salinization)
• The interactions between irrigation, soil hydrology (including deep drainage) and socio-economic impacts.
• The analysis of the bio-geo-physical and social dynamics related to rainfed and irrigated agriculture in both arid and non-arid areas and oases, including the use of non-conventional waters (e.g. water harvesting), and managed aquifer recharge systems
• The management of rangeland areas, including their restoration

This session is co—sponsored by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID, to be confirmed) and the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA, to be confirmed).

Emerging contaminants (e.g., PFAS, pharmaceuticals, microplastics) and climate change pose new challenges to our already fragile ecosystems. The vadose zone is a dynamically changing heterogeneous system, which plays a key role in regulating water and solute exchanges between atmosphere, vegetation, and groundwater and hosts a large portion of subsurface biochemical reactions. Understanding the interrelation between hydrological, physicochemical, and biological processes in the unsaturated zone is paramount to developing sustainable management strategies. This can solely be attained by translating novel experimental insights into well-validated modeling tools, which can benefit from recent advances in machine learning.
This session welcomes research that advances the current understanding of the vadose zone hydro-biogeochemical functioning across multiple scales, including experimental or modeling approaches, and field or simulation studies. In particular, we encourage researchers to participate with contributions on the following topics:
• Monitoring of water flow, solute transport, and biochemical reactions from the pore scale to the field scale
• Experimental investigation and numerical modeling of the reactive transport of emerging contaminants in variably-saturated porous media
• Influence of static and dynamically changing soil structures (e.g., heterogeneity) on water flow and reactive solute transport
• Transport of water and contaminants in/from the rhizosphere into the plant
• Development of novel modeling approaches to predict water and chemical transport in the vadose zone
• Novel techniques for model appraisal, including calibration, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty assessment, and surrogate-based modeling for hydro-biogeochemical vadose zone modeling.

Geophysical imaging techniques are widely used to characterize and monitor structures and processes in the shallow subsurface. Active methods include seismic, electrical resistivity, induced polarization, electromagnetic, and ground-penetrating radar, whereas passive approaches draw on ambient noise and electrical self-potential measurements. Advances in experimental design, instrumentation, acquisition, processing, numerical modelling, open hardware and software, and inversion continue to push the limits of spatial and temporal resolution. Nonetheless, the interpretation of geophysical images often remains ambiguous. Challenges addressed in this session include optimal acquisition strategies, automated processing and associated error quantification, spatial and temporal regularization of model parameters, integration of non-geophysical data and geological/process realism into imaging workflows, joint inversion, as well as quantitative interpretation through suitable petrophysical relations, and uncertainty quantification throughout the workflow.

We invite submissions spanning the full spectrum of near-surface geophysical imaging, from methodological innovation to diverse applications at different scales. Contributions on combining complementary methods, machine learning, and process monitoring are particularly encouraged.

The pollution of arable soils by plastic is a global issue of increasing concern to scientific communities and the public alike. Soils have become a major sink for plastics, with agricultural land ranking among the most polluted land-use categories. Despite this, significant knowledge gaps remain concerning the analysis of plastic in soil, its sources, and its fate. This session seeks to bridge these knowledge gaps, which is an essential step towards improving risk assessments, informing policies, guiding agricultural practices and industrial strategies to mitigate plastic pollution and its environmental impact. We welcome contributions from observational, laboratory, and modelling research in arable soil from the scale of nano- to macroplastics, including:
• Detection of plastics in soil systems: Methods for sampling, detection, and quantifying plastic pollution.
• Degradation of plastic in soil: Physical and chemical degradation, photodegradation, biodegradation, additive leaching, and the sorption processes of other chemicals.
• Impact of plastic on soil ecosystems: Physical and chemical interactions between soil and plastic particles, eco-toxicological effects of plastics and/or their leached additives on soil properties, soil health, plant growth and soil fauna.
• Transport dynamics of plastics: Transport of plastics and their co-transport with other contaminants from soil to other environmental compartments.
• Economic and policy perspectives: Economic drivers for agricultural plastic use, designing solutions, and supporting policies and regulations for reducing and sustainably managing agricultural plastics.

Research related to, but not explicitly listed above, may also be considered.

Soil contamination is complex, multifactorial process that threatens ecosystem services, agricultural productivity, and sustainability. Traditional field-based methods for evaluating soil contamination and its restoration are often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and spatially constrained. The integration of remote sensing data with in-situ observations and modelling frameworks enhances our capacity to map degradation patterns and assess recovery trajectories.This session targets soil contamination monitoring via remote and proximal sensing as well as spanning other soil degradation processes resulting from contamination such as erosion, SOC decline, salinization, landscape alteration, compaction.. We welcome contributions using UAV, airborne and satellite (multispectral/hyperspectral, SAR, LiDAR) together with in-situ/proximal sensors (Vis-NIR/DRS, XRF, EM/GPR), including: (i) indicator retrieval (e.g., SOC, texture/clay, moisture, roughness, crusting, vegetation stress); (ii) bare-soil compositing/time-series workflows; (iii) physics-based (or process-based) vs. ML approaches; (iv) sensor/data fusion ; (v) spectral libraries & transferability; (vi) case studies tracking degradation and recovery trajectories under diverse management actions or amendments (without restricting to any specific remediation strategy). The aim is to advance scalable, reproducible workflows that deliver decision-ready products for land degradation assessment and restoration.

Soils have been identified as a major sink for plastics which has led to increasing concerns for essential soil ecosystem services. However, we still lack an in-depth understanding of transport processes and the fate of macro-, micro-, and nanoplastics in the terrestrial environment. In this session, we invite contributions that present empirical, monitoring, and modelling studies for all scales of plastic pollution and soil systems, advancing our mechanistic understanding of transport and fate in the terrestrial environment. This includes but is not limited to urban settings, agroecosystems, and soil interfaces between different environmental compartments. Presentations may focus on:
• Experimental studies at different scales (lab, mesocosm, field, etc.) advancing our process-based understanding of transport and transformation processes
• Monitoring efforts to understand source attribution and quantification of spatiotemporal trends in inputs, releases, and transfers
• Models addressing fate and transport processes within terrestrial environments and their interfaces, such as connected aquatic and atmospheric systems
• Human behaviour, littering and littering dynamics, urban drainage systems, and solutions

One of the main problems facing society today is soil degradation and contamination. Soil quality affects environmental and human health directly, through its capacity to retain or immobilise inorganic and organic pollutants, and indirectly, through its impact on water quality and food security.
This session aims to bring together research studies addressing the relationship between soil quality and environmental and human health through the processes and pathways of exposure to contaminants, and how this exposure is recorded in the soil. The aim is to promote and integrate studies that improve the assessment of environmental quality and human health with soil quality indicators for agricultural, forest and urban soils, as well as strategies for the mitigation or remediation of soil. We will also highlight studies focusing on new technologies to assess and improve soil quality, as well as multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable soil management and their impact on human health.
We invite colleagues to present their studies and form new cross-cutting, multidisciplinary partnerships to propose solutions or ways to identify soil health-related risks and risks to environmental and human health.

Soil is a critical component of terrestrial ecosystems, playing a central role in food production and other ecosystem services. However, various human activities and soil management practices have led to widespread contamination of the soil (e.g. with metals, metalloids, radionuclides, organic compounds, and emerging contaminants), as well as other factors that degrade the soil (e.g. erosion, salinisation, and loss of organic matter). It is essential to understand the extent, sources and impacts of soil contamination in order to inform sustainable land management and remediation strategies. Several materials and remediation techniques have been studied, mainly at laboratory/greenhouse scale, but their effectiveness in the field is unknown.
This session focuses on advances in the assessment, monitoring, and recovery of contaminated soils, providing a platform for interdisciplinary discussion across soil science, environmental geochemistry, ecology, and restoration science. We invite colleagues to present their studies on the following topics: Soil health and the mitigation of contaminating processes; Assessment of contaminated areas and risk using classical techniques, bioindicators, biomarkers, and/or digital tools; Evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of techniques and materials (e.g. phytoremediation, technosols, biochar, nanoparticles, and other organic and inorganic amendments) for soil remediation processes and their environmental applications; Modelling the behaviour of potentially hazardous substances and nutrients in contaminated and remediated soils; Soil-plant interactions in contaminated and recovered environments; Monitoring and the environmental response of ecosystems after the implementation of remediation programmes; Legal frameworks and the limitations of soil remediation strategies; among other.
This session will provide an opportunity to present studies and establish new partnerships, with the aim of developing multidisciplinary strategies that can contribute to the assessment and remediation of contaminated sites.

The transfer of sediments and associated contaminants plays an important role in catchment ecosystems as they directly influence water quality, habitat conditions, and biogeochemical cycles. Contaminants may include heavy metals, pesticides, nutrients, radionuclides, and various organic, as well as organometallic compounds. The environmental risk posed by sediment-bound contaminants is largely determined by the sources and rate at which sediments are delivered to surface water bodies, the residence time in catchments, lakes, and river systems, as well as biogeochemical transformation processes. However, the dynamics of sediment and contaminant redistribution is highly variable in space and time due to the complex non-linear processes involved. This session focuses on sources, transport pathways, storage, re-mobilization, and travel times of sediments and contaminants across temporal and spatial scales, as well as their impact on freshwater ecosystems.

This session particularly addresses the following issues:
- Sediment and contaminant transfer along the Land–River–Lake Continuum
- Delivery rates of sediments and contaminants from various sources (i.e. agriculture, urban areas, mining, industry or natural areas);
- Transport, retention and remobilization of sediments and contaminants in catchments and river reaches, including the influence of human activities like hydropower and flood management.;
- Modelling of sediment and contaminant transport on various temporal and spatial scales;
- Biogeochemical controls on contaminant transport and transformation;
- Studies on sedimentary processes and morphodynamics, particularly sediment budgets;
- Linkages between catchment systems and lakes, including reservoirs;
- Analysis of sediment archives to appraise landscape scale variations in sediment and contaminant yield over medium to long time-scales;
- Impacts of sediments and contaminants on floodplain, riparian, hyporheic and other in-stream ecosystems;
- Response of sediment and contaminant dynamics in catchments, lakes and rivers to changing boundary conditions and human actions;
- Assessing human impact on landforms and geomorphological processes in sediment and contaminant transport.
- Novel, low-cost, and open-source methods for increasing the coverage and accessibility of measuring and modelling sediment and pollutant fluxes

The present context of accelerated changes in both climate and land use imposes an unprecedent pressure on a number of vulnerable ecosystems including wetlands, forests and rangelands, in which vegetation closely interacts and coevolves with soils and landforms. Complex interactions between climate, soils and biotic factors are involved in the development of landform-soil-vegetation feedbacks and play an important role in making ecosystems resilient to disturbances. In addition, large shifts in the distribution of vegetation and soils are associated with losses of ecosystem services (including carbon capture), frequently involving thresholds of ecosystem stability and nonlinear responses to both human and climatic pressures. This session will focus on ecogeomorphological and ecohydrological aspects of landscapes (including their connectivity), conservation of soil resources, and the restoration of ecosystem services and functions. We welcome theoretical, modelling, and empirical studies addressing the distribution of vegetation and coevolving soils and landforms, and particularly, contributions with a wide appreciation of the soil erosion-vegetation relationships that rule the formation of landscape-level spatial organization. We also welcome studies describing the implications of these spatial patterns of soils and vegetation for the resilience and stability of ecosystems under the pressure of climate change and/or human disturbances.

Soil water retention is being influenced by anthropogenic factors such as changes in soil management methods and land uses. These changes can affect the entire soil-plant-water systems and ecosystems, hence, monitoring these changes is necessary. The goal of this session is to share new insights into soil-water-plant relations and to advance our understanding of soil science with special focus on soil management methods and land use types. Studies on soil, soil moisture, plant measurements, modeling, and the influence of water retention measures are especially welcome in this session.

Soil health embraces the importance of soil function to the wider ecosystem in the past, presence, and future. Despite the formulation of such a holistic concept alongside its implementation in legal frameworks (e.g. the EU soil monitoring law), the quantification of soil health has continuing challenges. The first question is how to bound soil health, in essence, i) what is the appropriate reference framework, followed by ii) assessing how soil health should be monitored in a statistically robust way, iii) how should the most appropriate indicators be selected, iv) how do we ensure that indicators are robust to future technological change, and v) how do we integrate indicators into efficient indices? To meet these expectations for soil health evaluation and assessment, we need to establish known indicators and investigate new ones. Transdisciplinary indices are required that integrate biological, chemical and physical aspects which can produce both leading, concurrent and lagging indicators. This will require new measurement techniques including remote sensing of large areas, publicly available datasets of collected soil properties (e.g. LUCAS), and the use of mapping including artificial intelligence to process the plethora of data (e.g. EcoDataCube.eu; SoilGrids). Moreover, it needs to be determined how to integrate such new approaches into established monitoring.
To move from purely a collection of indicators to indicator integration and evolution for different soil types and land covers, we invite presentations on:
• Definition of reference and potential soil health status
• Development of soil health indicator framing in support of the EU soil monitoring law
• Testing new soil health indicators related to the risk of compaction, erosion, reduced biological activity and diversity, contamination and salinization, and depletion of organic matter and nutrients and how it changes
• Formulation of soil health indicators and indices across disciplines; integrating biological, chemical, and physical indicators
• New measurement techniques which enable the efficient monitoring of state and change indicators
• Modelling approaches to bridge the scale gap between point measurements and Pan-European monitoring

Orchards and vineyards are among the most widespread perennial cropping systems worldwide, shaping landscapes, rural economies, and cultural heritage. Their soils provide essential functions for productivity and resilience, but are increasingly challenged by intensive management, land degradation, and climate variability. At the same time, these systems offer unique opportunities to enhance soil health, sequester carbon, and support biodiversity through innovative management practices.

This session invites contributions on soil processes, management practices, and ecosystem services in orchards and vineyards across diverse climatic zones. We welcome studies on:

- soil organic carbon, nutrient cycling, and microbial activity in perennial crop soils,

- management strategies such as cover crops, reduced tillage, mulching, or organic amendments,

- monitoring approaches including spectroscopy, isotopic methods, and remote sensing,

- modelling of soil–plant–climate interactions and scenario analysis for sustainable management,

- frameworks and composite indicators for assessing ecosystem services, trade-offs, and synergies.


We particularly encourage integrative contributions that bridge experimentation, monitoring, modelling, and stakeholder perspectives. By gathering case studies and methodologies across regions and disciplines, this session aims to foster a holistic understanding of how to sustain soil functions in perennial cropping systems under evolving environmental and societal demands.

Peatlands play an important role in all kinds of Earth´s landscapes, especially with respect to their ability to fulfil multiple ecosystem functions and deliver manifold ecosystem services. Amongst others, they store water and carbon and host various highly specified species. Thus, the conservation of existing and restoration of degraded peatlands gain political and practical importance in serving the dual challenge of biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation. However, pedological and hydrological characteristics of these areas fundamentally determine the design of restoration strategies as well as the resulting impacts on the environmental situation. Moreover, as a considerable proportion of potentially relevant sites is used for agricultural, horticultural or forestry purposes, their restoration and conservation are tightly linked to a socio – economic dimension that needs to be accounted for in the planning and implementation of interventions. This is especially true in densely populated regions of Europe, where competing societal interests often shape the success or the failure of restoration and conservation attempts. Potential projects are further under high pressure to meet robust policy targets and economic expectations. To reconcile these demands, science-based strategies are essential to guide effective strategies and ensure that restoration and conservation of peatlands are both ecologically sound and socially sustainable.
In this session, we invite results on different aspects of peatland restoration and conservation, drawing on both empirical and modelled studies. We particularly welcome studies that address or include:
- Data-driven decision support tools for peatland restoration planning and implementation
- Quantification of socio-economic, ecological, and biophysical indicators in restoration design, application, and effectiveness assessments; derived by monitoring or modelling approaches
- Socio-economic frameworks to accompany sustainable and long-term economic strategies for restored or conserved peatlands
- Science-guided implementation strategies across levels of ecosystem degradation

Peat still is a very important constituent of growing media, for the production of vegetables and fruits just as the production of ornamentals and trees. Due to the efforts and regulations to protect peatlands, there are increasing activities to find suitable substitutes to meet the demands of production. However, these partly new materials may be linked to other problems – either in their own production process or with respect to their further use during plant cultivation. In this session new approaches for substituting peat shall be discussed and possible solutions to overcome certain disadvantages presented.

This session explores the ecological, hydrological, and socio-economic dynamics of forest peatlands undergoing drainage, rewetting, or restoration. Topics include carbon dynamics, water table regulation, biodiversity shifts, and ecosystem service trade-offs under climate change and land-use pressures. We welcome contributions on carbon and GHG fluxes, biodiversity, water regulation, and wood production under changing climate and management regimes. Studies integrating monitoring, modeling, stakeholder engagement, and policy relevance are especially encouraged.

Predicting Earth systems response to environmental change, especially conditions that are unprecedented in the observational record, remains a key challenge. It requires integration of hydrological, geochemical and biological processes at different spatial and temporal scales throughout a disturbance event or manipulative experiment. Despite a lot of progress in data collection, monitoring, experimentation and modelling, projections of future biogeochemical cycling in the Earth system remain highly uncertain. Individual disciplines, such as ecosystem ecology, soil science and hydrology have made great advances in their respective process understanding and modelling, but are not well integrated. The Earth’s Critical Zone, extending from the top of the canopy through the soil and groundwater down to the top of bedrock, offers a perspective to integrate different disciplines to better understand and manage the skin of the Earth.

Experiments are powerful tools to discern controls on individual process rates at their respective temporal and spatial scales and help constrain and parametrize them in mechanistic models. For integrated systems, such as the Critical Zone, experimentation and modelling requires a nested approach to address processes on different temporal and spatial scales. Oftentimes, processes remain weakly constrained due to technical and logistical challenges of acquiring relevant data. A key factor for integration but also remaining uncertainty is the inherent spatial heterogeneity of soil or canopy components. Large scale manipulations provide an opportunity to collect data on realistic scales.

In this session, we are welcoming contributions and case studies of successful integration of experiments and models at scale from different Critical Zone components, as well as integration across spatial and temporal scales and disciplines. We are particularly interested in belowground components, where we expect to see progress by bringing together soil scientists, ecologists and hydrologists.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The extraction and processing of mineral resources, whether from oil sands, coal, or metal mines, generate large volumes of mine wastes, including fluid tailings, waste rock, and other by-products that pose long-term environmental challenges. In the case of oil sands, fluid tailings are comprised of processed water, sand, silt, clay, and residual constituents such as bitumen, diluent, and sulfide minerals like pyrite. In metal and coal mining, tailings may contain finely ground rock, processing chemicals, and trace metals, all of which require thoughtful management to prevent environmental degradation. Given their scale and complexity, mine waste deposits are expected to comprise significant portions of closure landscapes worldwide, and returning these sites to stable, sustainable ecosystems remain one of the most pressing challenges faced by industry, regulators, and society.
Reclamation goals across mining sectors focus on reconstructing functioning landscapes that support ecological, hydrological, and geotechnical stability. Achieving success depends on advances in material characterization, landform design, soil cover development, water management, and reclamation practices. Material characterization of tailings and waste rock is central to this process, as it informs the design of soil covers, the selection of plant communities, and the prediction of long-term performance. The reclamation of consolidated tailings and mine wastes is a relatively new and evolving field of research that requires innovative approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration among soil scientists, geologists, engineers, hydrologists, and ecologists.
This session aims to highlight the latest research and practical advances in tailings and mine waste characterization, landform construction, and reclamation strategies across a range of mining contexts. By sharing insights from oil sands, metal mining, and other sectors, we hope to build broader awareness of the challenges and opportunities associated with post-mining landscapes. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that reclamation efforts deliver functional, resilient soils and ecosystems that will endure for future generations.

Agriculture is pivotal in the European economy and the global food supply. Europe is a significant producer of diverse crops, contributing significantly to feeding the world's population. The quality and characteristics of agricultural products are closely linked to the specific environmental conditions in which they are grown. These environmental factors, including climate, soil, and water, can vary significantly across regions and are increasingly influenced by the challenges of climate change.
Understanding the spatial and temporal variability of environmental factors is crucial for managing and preserving agricultural landscapes and adapting to climate change's current and future impacts.
This requires a deep understanding of plants’ mechanisms for acclimation, keeping in mind that functional traits (e.g., phenology,etc.) can be indicators and proxies of plant status, plasticity and resilience. Moreover, it involves applied research and technological innovation in agriculture, including the use of sensors to monitor environmental variables, remote sensing and drones for crop monitoring, predictive models for yield and disease, and advanced methods to study nutrient cycles and soil health.
Furthermore, growing public awareness of the importance of ecosystem health and sustainability has led to adopting quantitative approaches to understand the link between agricultural practices and ecosystem services, which are crucial for achieving long-term environmental goals. Agroecological approaches, such as cover cropping, organic amendments, and integrated pest management, are being increasingly adopted to enhance biodiversity, soil health, water and nutrient retention, and resilience to climate change.
On these bases, the session will delve into:
- Quantifying and Spatially Modeling Environmental Factors: Examining the complex interplay of climate, soil, and water and their influence on plant growth, yield, and quality.
- Agricultural Resilience to Climate Change: Exploring the adaptability of agricultural systems in the face of a changing climate and identifying strategies for adaptation and mitigation.
- Sustainable Agricultural Practices and Ecosystem Services: Analyzing the impact of diverse agricultural practices on soil and water quality, biodiversity, and related ecosystem services.
- Precision Agriculture and Technological Innovation: Utilizing advanced technologies to optimize resource use, improve crop management, and enhance sustainability.

Soil and water resources are under mounting pressure from climate variability, land degradation, and the intensification of agricultural production. In many regions, inappropriate or excessive nutrient applications undermine crop productivity in the long term, while simultaneously accelerating soil erosion, depleting soil organic carbon stocks, and contaminating surface and groundwater bodies. These interconnected processes not only compromise ecosystem integrity but also pose significant risks to food security, rural livelihoods, and environmental sustainability.
Yet, nutrient management also represents a powerful entry point for change. When carefully designed and context-specific, nutrient strategies can enhance soil fertility, stabilize agricultural landscapes, and reduce diffuse pollution. Advances such as precision fertilization, the recycling of organic amendments, integrated crop–soil–water systems, and the use of digital decision-support tools are opening new pathways to improve nutrient efficiency. These innovations have the potential to transform agriculture into a driver of soil conservation, water protection, and climate resilience, ensuring that productivity gains are achieved without sacrificing ecological health.
We particularly welcome contributions on (but not limited to):
• Precision nutrient application and decision-support tools to minimize losses
• Conservation agriculture practices (e.g., cover crops, crop rotations, no-till) and their impact on soil fertility and hydrological cycles
• Interactions between nutrient management, soil organic carbon dynamics, and erosion control
• Monitoring and modelling of nutrient fluxes in soil–water systems at plot, farm, and watershed scales
• Nature-based and agroecological solutions, and Biostimulants for nutrient retention and water conservation
• Policy, socio-economic, and farmer-engagement perspectives on sustainable nutrient management
By bringing together soil scientists, agronomists, hydrologists, ecologists, and modelers, this session seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and promote actionable solutions for sustainable land and water management. Contributions from early-career scientists, as well as examples from Mediterranean, arid, and semi-arid regions, are especially encouraged.

Soil is the largest terrestrial pool of carbon. Consequently, soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil inorganic carbon (SIC) are the main indicators of soil health, fertility, and biodiversity. Effective monitoring and modeling of SOC and SIC stocks are necessary to understand their dynamics and identify chances for sustainable management. Modeling techniques of soil carbon are essential for scaling up data and predicting future changes, but monitoring at spatiotemporal levels in agroecosystem management is still an important challenge.
Soil carbon stores can be greatly influenced by land cover and management, including clear-cutting, soil sealing, and agricultural intensification, especially tillage. In addition, climate change, especially temperature and precipitation patterns, can modify the dynamics of soil carbon, through an effect on soil moisture regime and microbial activity. Droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events have become more frequent and severe due to global warming, which might further affect soil carbon levels.
Also, bulk Density (BD) influences the accuracy of carbon stock calculations and is therefore an important factor in soil carbon monitoring. BD is strongly, but not solely, affected by soil compaction, tillage, and the application of organic amendments. Erroneously measured or calculated BD can thus imply errors in soil carbon stock estimation.
Nutrient availability regulates C decomposition and stabilization processes, thereby tightly linking nutrient cycles with soil C dynamics. Tools such as isotopic tracers, lysimeter studies, and digital monitoring platforms provide new insights into nutrient fluxes and their interactions with soil carbon pools.
This session addresses the dynamics of SOC, SIC, and nutrients in agroecosystems, while investigating innovative monitoring and modelling strategies for optimizing soil carbon and nutrient management, such as machine learning, process-based models, and remote sensing, to improve our knowledge of soil carbon and nutrient dynamics and to support decision-making in natural and agroecosystems. Contributions that integrate monitoring and modelling of nutrient–carbon interactions and that highlight their implications for sustainable soil management are particularly welcome.

The sustainable transformation and application of agro-livestock and forestry residues offer promising solutions to improve soil health, enhance productivity, and mitigate climate change within a circular economy framework. This session responds to the priorities of the EU Mission Soil, which places soil health at the center of environmental policy for the first time and fosters the development of innovative practices that bridge scientific research and agricultural management.
We welcome studies that explore the entire chain of value from residue transformation processes—such as composting, pyrolysis, or anaerobic digestion—to their functional characterization and agronomic applications. Particular interest lies in contributions that demonstrate how these materials influence soil properties, plant physiology, and microbial communities, while simultaneously enhancing carbon sequestration, ecosystem services, and resilience to climate change. By bringing together experimental work under controlled conditions with demonstrative field trials, this session will highlight how waste valorization can become a driver of sustainable soil management, turning environmental challenges into opportunities for circular solutions.
The session aims to create a meeting point for researchers, early-career scientists, and practitioners from academia, research centers, and industry to present recent results and exchange knowledge on waste management, recycling, and valorization strategies. Emphasis will be placed on initiatives that translate scientific advances into tangible practices for sustainable agriculture and resilient agroecosystems.

Despite ample literature, research is not exhaustive about the wildfire impacts on the different components of the forest ecosystem (plants, water and soil) and the related post-fire issues. In particular, literature has not clearly identified the most suitable restoration strategy, due to the variability of the environmental conditions, and thus clear guidelines still lack. There is evidently the need to better understand the impacts of wildfire and post-fire management techniques at hillslope and channel scales on hydrological, geomorphological and ecological processes in forest ecosystems. This session aims at proposing the most recent researches evaluating the effectiveness of the several post-fire management techniques experienced worldwide. Bringing together contributions from several contexts, dealing with detailed field experiences, validated models and effectiveness assessment methods, can help to support the restoration actions of land managers in fire-affected areas, and, at the same time, identify scientific literature gaps and future research directions.

Nowadays, soil degradation is a major issue for the environment, ecosystem services, and climate regulation. Forest and agricultural systems are particularly sensitive to degradation processes such as desertification, erosion, salinisation, and pollution caused by both climatic and anthropogenic factors. Changes in precipitation regimes with rising average temperatures can alter soil water balance, leading to water deficits, nutrient losses, and increased soil salinity. Similarly, inadequate land management practices can increase physical and chemical disturbances that affect soil quality and biodiversity.
This contribution aims to host recent observations on different scales, from monitoring networks with long-term observations to remote sensing, illustrating the processes and the effects of soil degradation, resistance, and resilience across different contexts and land uses. We expect to shed some light on how changes in land use, deforestation, intensive cultivation, or excessive use of agrochemicals can affect depletion of soil properties and quality.
In parallel, we will discuss on current and potentially new approaches to reversing soil degradation using sustainable and resilient practices in the fields of conservation agriculture, agroforestry, organic fertilizers and soil amendments, methods to prevent erosion, and control soil salinity. These practices have positive effects on soil, improving its structure, water retention, biological activity, and helping to mitigate extreme weather events. We also believe that combining observation series with participatory methods and policy frameworks will help to enhance effective soil conservation measures.
Finally, this combined vision, moving from issues related to both soil forest and agricultural contexts to the effects of sustainable approaches into soil resources management, looks to contribute to long-terms soil conservation, productivity and multifunctionality.

Closing nutrient loops is vital for sustainable agriculture and remediation. Modern farming relies on linear nutrient flows, where much of the input is lost via leaching, runoff, or emissions, causing soil degradation, water pollution, and climate impacts. Chars (including biochar) and organic amendments offer tools to restore soils, improve nutrient efficiency, and aid remediation. Their integration supports circular systems that enhance fertility, crop yields, and environmental quality.

Individually, chars and organic amendments boost soil organic matter, water retention, pollutant immobilization or degradation, and nutrient supply. When used together, they create synergies beyond single effects: improved soil–water–plant interactions, stronger nutrient cycling, stabilization of soil structure, and reduced nutrient losses. They also help cut harmful emissions, including greenhouse gases and ammonia, while avoiding toxic accumulation.

Although, their effectiveness depends on feedstock, production and composting methods, particle size, rates, and biogeochemical context. Outcomes also vary with climate, soil texture, hydrology, and management. Therefore, understanding these interactions is essential for optimizing use and ensuring long term impact.

This session aims to address:

• Field and lab experiments on productivity, nutrient efficiency, and soil health.
• Remediation of polluted soils and aquatic systems.
• Modeling nutrient cycling, pollutant dynamics, and amendment behavior.
• Life cycle assessment and sustainability studies.
• Effects of feedstock, processing, and composting methods (composting, co‑composting, aging).
• Investigations on emissions, volatilization, and leaching.
• Innovative practices and case studies for nutrient cycling and remediation.

We welcome contributions from experimental, modeling, and interdisciplinary research linking agronomy, soil science, hydrology, and sustainability. By engaging researchers, including early career scientists, this session seeks to identify best practices and innovative strategies for advancing nutrient management and remediation.

Unsustainable land management practices and a changing climate are causing the degradation and desertification of large areas of land. The reduction of the capacity of the land to maintain vegetation, produce food and sequester soil carbon is affecting the livelihoods and traditions of local communities. This session aims to contribute to the reversal of desertification through the exchange of knowledge and experiences on the assessment and mitigation of desertification. We welcome assessment studies that integrate multiple data types, such as satellite-derived data, ground-based monitoring and sampling, socio-economic surveys and narrative analysis, at different working scales. We are interested in methods for improving the analysis and mapping of Land Degradation Neutrality, in support of the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 15.3.1. At the same time, we encourage presentations from experimental studies on the development and testing of innovative technologies for combatting desertification in degraded land. We would like to hear from field investigations on Sustainable Land Management practices that aim to reverse past degradation via restoration and rehabilitation. This session would like to showcase success stories and recent advances, but also offers the floor to presentations and discussions of desertification innovations and approaches that failed or require new directions.
This session is supported by the international Communities of Knowledge and Practice on desertification assessment and innovations for sustainable land management, facilitated by the MONALISA and TERRASAFE projects, which you are welcome to join! MONALISA (GA: 101157867) and TERRASAFE (GA: 101157373) are co-funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme under the SOIL MISSION, UK Research and Innovation and SERI - Swiss Confederation.

Wildfires are a global phenomenon with significant environmental, social, and economic impacts. These impacts are expected to intensify due to climate change, land abandonment, inadequate land management and planning factors that further drive land degradation and reduce the provision of ecosystem services.

This growing threat calls for urgent scientific attention to better understand the effects of wildfires on ecosystems and to develop integrated tools for land management before and after fires. Such efforts are essential for reducing vulnerability to wildfires and mitigating their impacts. However, this challenge extends beyond the scientific community, requiring the active involvement of stakeholders and policy-makers worldwide, as fundamental resources, such as water, soil, raw materials, and habitats, are at risk.

This session invites contributions from researchers studying the effects of wildfires on ecosystems, covering the full spectrum from prevention to post-fire recovery. We welcome laboratory, field, and modelling studies on the following topics:

i. Prescribed and/or experimental fires
ii. Fire severity and burn severity
iii. Fire effects on vegetation, soil, and water
iv. Post-fire hydrological and erosive responses
v. Post-fire management and mitigation
vi. Socio-economic aspects of pre- and post-fire land management
vii. Fire risk assessment and modelling

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.

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

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.

Agriculture is the largest consumer of water worldwide and at the same time irrigation is a sector where huge differences between modern technology and traditional practices do exist. Furthermore, reliable and organized data about water withdrawals for agricultural purposes are generally lacking worldwide, thus making irrigation the missing variable to close the water budget over anthropized basins. As a result, building systems for improving water use efficiency in agriculture is not an easy task, even though it is an immediate requirement of human society for sustaining the global food security, rationally managing the resource and reducing causes of poverties, migrations and conflicts among states, which depend on trans-boundary river basins. Climate changes and increasing human pressure together with traditional wasteful irrigation practices are enhancing the conflictual problems in water use also in countries traditionally rich in water. Hence, saving irrigation water improving irrigation efficiency on large areas with modern techniques is an urgent action to do. In fact, it is well known that agriculture uses large volumes of water with low irrigation efficiency, accounting in Europe for around 24% of the total water use, with peak of 80% in the Southern Mediterranean part and may reach the same percentage in Mediterranean non-EU countries (EEA, 2009; Zucaro 2014). North Africa region has the lowest per-capita freshwater resource availability among all Regions of the world (FAO, 2018).
Several studies have recently explored the possibility of monitoring irrigation dynamics and by optimizing irrigation water management to achieve precision farming exploiting remote sensing information combined with ground data and/or water balance modelling.
In this session, we will focus on: the use of remote sensing data to estimate irrigation volumes and timing; management of irrigation using hydrological modeling combined with satellite data; improving irrigation water use efficiency based on remote sensing vegetation indices, hydrological modeling, satellite soil moisture or land surface temperature data; precision farming with high resolution satellite data or drones; farm and irrigation district irrigation management; improving the performance of irrigation schemes; estimates of irrigation water requirements from ground and satellite data; ICT tools for real-time irrigation management with remote sensing and ground data coupled with hydrological modelling.

Sustainable management of Mediterranean soils requires advanced tools to monitor, quantify, and predict soil health under the combined pressures of climate change, land degradation, and intensive agriculture. This session invites contributions that address methodological advances in soil metrics, geo-informatics, and statistical frameworks supporting the quantification of key soil health indicators such as soil organic carbon, nutrient availability, soil-water, and soil biodiversity. We particularly welcome studies employing geospatial modeling, remote sensing, big data integration, and machine learning to derive soil indicators and pedotransfer functions that perform across heterogeneous Mediterranean environments and soil types. Furthermore, the session seeks to showcase case studies demonstrating the standardized soil metrics and digital infrastructures (e.g., data cubes, decision support systems) can enhance multi-actor engagement and policy uptake. By bridging soil science, data analytics, and sustainability assessments, this session aims to foster innovative pathways for monitoring and restoring Mediterranean soils in line with the objectives of the EU Soil Mission.

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

Observations are the cornerstone of understanding hydrological processes and advancements in technologies provide a great source of information. Yet, integrating these multiple sources of measurement into data-driven and physics-informed models remains a significant challenge in vadose zone hydrology.
Recent advancements in deep learning have opened new avenues for modeling complex earth system processes. This session will explore the cutting-edge application of deep learning approaches to characterize soil hydrothermal properties and to model and predict soil water, heat, and solute transport.
Therefore, soil processes can be simulated over different spatial scales, enabling reliable predictions of climate change, contamination, salinization, erosion, agricultural practices, and land-use impacts on soil and water resources.
We invite contributions on the following topics:
• Innovative observation techniques and technologies: New methods for measuring soil variables (e.g., soil moisture) and other vadose zone physical, chemical, and hydraulic properties.
• Data mining and analysis: Advanced techniques for extracting meaningful information from large and complex datasets.
• Data fusion and downscaling: Novel methods for bridging the gap between coarse-resolution data and fine-scale applications by downscaling techniques including machine learning.
• Model development and integration: Coupling of models with various observation data sources and the application of novel approaches like deep and machine learning (i.e., multiphysics-informed neural networks, closure term modeling with machine learning).
• Applications and case studies: Demonstrations of how integrated observations and models can address specific hydrological challenges and evaluate the impact of natural and human disturbances on soil and water resources.
• Challenges and future directions: Discussions on the limitations and opportunities for future research in vadose zone hydrology.
By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, this session will significantly advance our understanding and management of the vadose zone, a critical region controlling the flow of water, nutrients, and pollutants, and linking between atmospheric water, surface water, and groundwater.

Sustainable soil and land management is a key challenge in the context of climate change. The complexity arises from the high spatial heterogeneity of soils and landscapes, as well as from differences in spatial and temporal scales of the processes driving soil functions and (agro)ecosystem dynamics. To address these challenges, integrated modelling approaches are needed that bridge scales, disciplines, and data sources.
This session invites contributions presenting and discussing innovative modelling strategies and data analyses for sustainable soil management and landscapes evolution. Topics include multi-scale modelling approaches, the integration of machine learning with mechanistic models, the direct assimilation of monitoring data into models (e.g. digital twin concepts), and the coupling of different models to represent interactions between soil, microbes, plants and the atmosphere. We especially welcome studies that highlight the potential and limitations of integrated approaches, exploring their application across various systems, from agroecosystems to natural ecosystems. The session aims to provide a platform for exchange on methods, experiences, and visions to advance soil and land management towards sustainability and resilience.

Climate extremes and unsustainable development are increasingly disrupting soil and water dynamics. Heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, and human pressures are reshaping water and sediment flows, accelerating land degradation, and threatening food and water security. Addressing these challenges requires continuous monitoring and innovative data integration across various spatial and temporal scales. In this context, sensing technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to monitor the Earth’s surface and understand its processes, especially when they're enhanced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced computational tools to enhance predictive capability and pattern recognition.

This session invites contributions that push the boundaries of how we observe, measure, and monitor soil and/or soil-water dynamics. We are looking to showcase and discuss research that spans a wide range of scales, from local plots to global systems, and employs a variety of sensing techniques, from proximal sensors (i.e., in-field and machinery sensors) to remote sensing (i.e., UAVs, airborne systems, and satellites).

We also welcome studies that explore the fusion of diverse geospatial datasets (e.g., soil sensors, LiDAR, photogrammetry, and satellite imagery) to gain a more holistic, multi-scale understanding of these processes. This also includes research that uses sensed data as input for modelling and/or aim at predict future scenarios under changing conditions.

This session is open to, but not limited to, the following topics and application fields (e.g., agriculture, forestry, urban development, and mountain environments):
Advanced proximal sensing and ground-based monitoring
• Remote sensing, UAV, airborne, and satellite remote sensing of soil and water investigations
• Fusion and integration of multi-source geospatial data
• AI and machine learning for soil and water analysis
• Novel monitoring workflows, protocols, and open-source tools
• Linking sensing data with process-based or distributed models
• Critical evaluations of opportunities and limitations of emerging technologies
• Translating sensing and modeling into decision-support frameworks

Interdisciplinary contributions are more then welcome, as well as the participation of early career scientists (ECS).

Spatial soil information is fundamental for environmental modelling and land management. Spatial representation (maps) of soil attributes (both laterally and vertically) and of soil-landscape processes are needed at a scale appropriate for environmental management. The challenge is to develop explicit, quantitative, and spatially realistic models of the soil-landscape continuum. Modern advances in soil sensing, geospatial technologies, and spatial statistics are enabling exciting opportunities to efficiently create more consistent, detailed, and accurate soil maps while providing information about the related uncertainty. The production of high-quality soil maps is a key issue because it enables stakeholders (e.g. farmers, planners, other scientists) to understand the variation of soils at the landscape, field, and sub-field scales. They can be used as input in environmental models, such as hydrological, climate or vegetation productivity (crop models) addressing the uncertainty in the soil layers and its impact in the environmental modelling. When the products of digital soil mapping are integrated within other environmental models it enables assessment and mapping of soil functions to support sustainable management. We welcome presentations that 1) demonstrate the implementation and use of digital soil maps in different disciplines such as agricultural (e.g. crops, food production) and environmental (e.g. element cycles, water, climate) modelling 2) advance the tools of digital soil mapping 3) investigate the philosophy and strategies of digital soil mapping at different scales and for different purposes. We also welcome contributions reporting the state of the art of soil property prediction from hyperspectral satellites, especially focusing on quantitative estimationsmaking use of data-driven approaches such as machine learning, and physically based modelling or the integration of both.

Recent advances in sensing, machine learning and process modeling have expanded on what is possible within Pedometrics, a branch of research at the interface of soil science and data science. However, many methodological challenges remain. This session focuses on methodological advances that improve the reliability, reproducibility and pedological soundness of digital soil mapping, spectroscopy and spectral transfer functions, pedo-transfer functions or other predictive statistical applications in soil science. We specifically invite contributions that address the underlying statistical, computational and conceptual tools needed to
1) produce pedologically consistent multi-property, multi-depth, multi-timepoint soil maps,
2) create suitable sampling designs for current state-of-the-art mapping approaches,
3) provide physically or chemically meaningful pedo-transfer functions,
4) quantify and propagate uncertainty in space–time and for multivariate outcomes,
5) provide methods for up- and downscaling (change-of-support) and realistic aggregation of uncertainties,
6) contribute to explainable machine learning and robust soil science-informed model diagnostics, and
7) integrate mechanistic soil process knowledge with data-driven algorithms into so-called hybrid approaches or soil science informed machine learning.
The session welcomes contributions that develop, compare, or benchmark novel approaches or present (open) software implementations that strengthen the foundations of pedometrics and enable robust and reproducible frameworks. We welcome developments towards all kinds of applications such as global to local soil health monitoring, soil function assessments or for farm level and forest management. The session aims to bring together statisticians, process modelers, computer scientists and pedologists to discuss methodological solutions that are general, reproducible and transferable across regions and applications.

Earth System Sciences (ESS) datasets, particularly those generated by high-resolution numerical models, are continuing to increase in terms of resolution and size. These datasets are essential for advancing ESS, supporting critical activities such as climate change policymaking, weather forecasting in the face of increasingly frequent natural disasters, and modern applications like machine learning.

The storage, usability, transfer and shareability of such datasets have become a pressing concern within the scientific community. State-of-the-art applications now produce outputs so large that even the most advanced data centres and infrastructures struggle not only to store them but also to ensure their usability and processability, including by downstream machine learning. Ongoing and upcoming community initiatives, such as digital twins and the 7th Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7), are already pushing infrastructures to their limits. With future investment in hardware likely to remain constrained, a critical and viable way forward is to explore (lossy) data compression & reduction that balance efficiency with the needs of diverse stakeholders. Therefore, the interest in compression has grown as a means to 1) make the data volumes more manageable, 2) reduce transfer times and computational costs, while 3) preserving the quality required for downstream scientific analyses.

Nevertheless, many ESS researchers remain cautious about lossy compression, concerned that critical information or features may be lost for specific downstream applications. Identifying these use-case-specific requirements and ensuring they are preserved during compression are essential steps toward building trust so that compression can become widely adopted across the community.

This session will present and discuss recent advances in data compression and reduction for ESS datasets, focusing on:

1) Advances in and reviews of methods, including classical, learning-based, and hybrid approaches, with attention to computational efficiency of compression and decompression.
2) Approaches to enhance shareability and processing of high-volume ESS datasets through data compression (lossless and lossy) and reduction.
3) Inter-disciplinary case studies of compression in ESS workflows.
4) Understanding the domain- and use-case specific requirements, and developing methods that provide these guarantees for lossy compression.

Healthy soils are the foundation to food security, biodiversity, climate adaptation, and resilient livelihoods. Yet progress in soil knowledge is slowed by fragmented monitoring approaches, uneven awareness among stakeholders, scarce harmonization attempts among existing databases and soil collection and analytical pipelines, and thus low interoperability of the integrated soil information.
This session will convene scientists, practitioners, data stewards, and policy actors to
1. compare soil-health and soil monitoring frameworks across agro-ecological zones, soil management, land uses, soils types, and horizons;
2. assess indicators (including subsoil functions) that integrate physical, chemical, and biological metrics;
3. share soil-awareness and literacy strategies for farmers, advisors, and citizens;
4. accelerate harmonisation of methods, metadata, and databases under FAIR principles;
5. provide relationship between soil health and economic and social impacts, and ecosystem services.
The session is supported by the PRIMA projects SHARInG-MeD and SOILS4MED, and Horizon projects SUS-SOIL and welcome contributions from any international, national and local actions taking into account soil healthfor either farm or forest management, and policy interventions.
Topics welcome include, but are not limited to:
• cross-walking indicator sets;
• calibration/validation protocols (lab, field, proximal/remote sensing, modelling);
• designs that bridge plot-level experiments and Living Labs/Lighthouses;
• workflows for integrating legacy datasets with new observations;
• interoperable vocabularies and ontologies;
• reproducible pipelines for FAIR data publication;
• and co-creation approaches that turn monitoring results into actionable advice and awareness campaigns;
• results from in site research setups or soil monitoring tools that merge various metrics of soil health.

A dedicated discussion will synthesise: (1) minimal yet robust core indicators (including subsoil metrics) usable across land uses; (2) a checklist for method comparability (sampling depths, reference materials, uncertainty); (3) practices to embed soil literacy in extension and education; and (4) a community roadmap for method and database harmonisation (open standards, APIs, governance). Outcomes will feed into an open statement and a shared repository of protocols, templates, and communication assets to expedite adoption in the various regions.

Observing soil moisture at the ground is essential to assess plant available water, manage water resources and calibrate, validate satellite products and conduct climate impact studies. Unfortunately, the availability of in situ observations is very limited in space and time. Whereas the spatial distribution is biased towards the global North, the temporal availability of soil moisture time series is on average 10 years as can be seen from the largest archive of in situ soil moisture, the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). Apart of the data availability issues, a substantial amount of the in situ observations face data quality issues that might result from sensor deployment, sensor calibration, data processing or other error sources.
This session will address issues in the development and deployment of state-of-the-art soil moisture observation networks, the financing of their long-term operation, data quality assurance, data imputation, and data scaling as well as sensor deployment and assessments of differences between these deployments. We further encourage contributions presenting developments of novel measurement techniques including citizen science initiatives and studies utilizing (primarily) in situ soil moisture to understand and assess hydrological processes, water availability, land-atmosphere feedbacks and soil moisture dependent hazards.

The Critical Zone (CZ) regulates many natural processes. Within the CZ, physical, chemical, and biological processes act at different spatial and temporal scales and it is a highly complex system with strong non-linear interactions. Recent advances highlight the opportunities of integrating novel measurement techniques with sophisticated modelling approaches to enhance process understanding and representation of CZ dynamics. This inter-disciplinary session brings together scientists to explore how cutting-edge measurement techniques (remote sensing, isotopic tracing, and high-resolution sensor networks, …) can be combined with advances modelling approaches (machine learning, data assimilation, coupled process-based models, constraint-based modelling, …) with the aim to foster comprehensive understanding of CZ processes. Topics may include: advances in measurements and modelling, processes in land-atmosphere interactions, upscaling of soil processes, interactions between soil hydrology and biogeochemical cycles, processes in the soil-plant system, parameterisation of soil processes across scales, and model-data integration.

Biochar is the solid product of thermochemical conversion of biomass in oxygen-limited conditions. Its chemical structure is characterised by a high level of carbon condensation granting stability and recalcitrance other than making it a viable mean of carbon storage. In fact, biochar can be regarded as an artificial analogue to geological materials such as inertinite macerals, preserved in the sedimentary rocks through geological time. On this account it can be efficiently characterized by organic petrography methods including, but not limited to, microscopic and spectroscopic techniques. Use of such methods can generate unprecedented insight into biochar’s physical-chemical properties and the effects of its production process, enhancing viability for end users.

This session welcomes contributions leveraging cutting-edge approaches making use of expertise in organic petrography techniques to elucidate biochar’s role as a mean of carbon storage and a tool for sustainable development. The objective is to draw from the legacy of organic carbon characterization to create a robust backbone for the understanding of biochar’s formation mechanisms, properties and implications for innovative applications. By integrating different analytical methods through the lenses of organic petrography, we aim to foster deeper insight into biochar dynamics advancing its use according to a scientific approach.

Therefore, our goal is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date toolbox for biochar characterization in geosciences through contributions concerning:

Innovative multi-proxy biochar characterization

Effects and optimization of biochar properties

Novel, data driven, insights on biochar’s stability and permanence for carbon storage

Effective management of soil and water resources is fundamental to advancing sustainable development and improving human well-being. Recent research underscores the critical role of water and sediment connectivity (the physical and functional linkage of a watershed's components) in the framework of integrated watershed management. The preservation of habitats, the enhancement of flood resistance and resilience, and the effective management of ecosystems are crucial for maintaining ecosystem health. Watershed management aims to achieve optimal connectivity or disconnectivity across various ecological domains—such as hydrology, ecology, and geomorphology—particularly in the context of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Understanding hydrological and sediment connectivity is paramount due to the complex nature of hydro-geomorphic systems and the multitude of mechanisms that can influence the efficiency of water and sediment transport within a watershed. Analyzing temporal variations in connectivity is essential for elucidating the effects of both natural and anthropogenic disturbances on water-sediment fluxes and related processes. Accordingly, this session invites research addressing connectivity within the framework of watershed management, with particular emphasis on innovative methodologies and approaches to advance understanding of connectivity, vegetation restoration, and watershed management. The session will cover a range of topics, including in-situ field monitoring, laboratory simulations, and the development and application of geomorphometric indices and models. The primary aim is to underscore the importance of connectivity in effectively addressing sediment and water-related challenges. Ultimately, the session seeks to provide managers with critical insights into the timing, location, and strategies for managing hydrological and geomorphic processes, with the overarching goal of achieving sustainable watershed management.

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.

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

Sustainable groundwater use depends on reliable estimates of groundwater recharge—a critical but difficult-to-quantify flux. Before water reaches the aquifer, surface inputs, vegetation, and vadose zone processes alter both its quantity and timing. Climate and land use changes, along with extreme events such as droughts and intense rainfall, further complicate the spatial and temporal dynamics of the recharge. Now more than ever, refining our understanding of recharge is critical to informing decisions and managing groundwater sustainably.
This session offers a platform to exchange concepts, expertise, and methods related to groundwater recharge estimation across disciplines and application contexts.
We invite contributions focusing on the estimation of groundwater recharge across multiple temporal and spatial scales, including studies that compare or combine different methods. Estimation approaches may be based on:

• Field-based measurements from various compartments of the hydrological cycle:
- Land surface water balance components
- Vadose zone measurements (e.g. soil moisture)
- Groundwater heads (water table fluctuations)
- Discharge measurements (baseflow separation)
- Environmental tracers for recharge estimation and model calibration (e.g., stable isotopes, radioisotopes, dissolved gases)
- Including suggestions for improved monitoring concepts

• Model-based approaches (local to global scale), such as:
- Water balance models
- Land surface models
- Physically-based vadose zone or groundwater models
- Hybrid or machine learning-supported methods
- Groundwater time-series models

• Upscaling strategies from point-scale to landscape-scale assessments

• Varying temporal scales from short-term recharge quantification to long-term recharge trends (past or future scenarios)

We welcome studies addressing recharge estimation for various purposes, including (but not limited to) agricultural water management and irrigation, forest management and ecosystem transition, groundwater resource planning, and sustainable management.

Soil erosion leading to land degradation is a significant geo-environmental challenge that may adversely impact agricultural productivity and hence threaten food security, underscoring the need for implementation of sustainable management policies. Rapid population growth and intensified rainfall patterns driven by climate change have accelerated soil erosion, exposing the fertile topsoil layer to transport. The eroded sediments are then deposited downstream, contributing to sedimentation in reservoirs. Addressing such challenges requires systematic investment in monitoring and modeling of soil erosion and sediment transport.
This session will emphasize recent advancements in process-based modeling, the application of remote sensing, and AI/ML techniques for sustainable soil and water management across different temporal and spatial scales. Satellite platforms such as Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS, and other high-resolution sensors offer valuable opportunities to monitor LULC changes, map reservoir surface areas, and assess land degradation. To quantify soil erosion and sediment delivery, both process-based and empirical models -- including RUSLE, SWAT, and InVEST -- remain essential tools for evaluating hydrological and geomorphological processes. In recent years, the integration of machine learning techniques has further enhanced these approaches by improving predictive accuracy, supporting robust classification, and enabling comprehensive uncertainty assessments of model outcomes.
We would like to invite abstract submissions in the following sub-domains:
• Field observations related to soil erosion and sediment transport.
• Remote sensing applications for soil and water management.
• Advances in modelling of soil erosion and sediment transport.
• Advances in cloud computing, including platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), high-performance computing, and big-data platforms for large-scale analysis.
• AI/ML and geospatial techniques for soil erosion and sediment transport modeling.
• Policy-level interventions for soil and water management.
This session aims to bring together researchers, engineers, scientists, and policymakers to share innovative methodologies and interdisciplinary perspectives through regional to global case studies. The primary goal is to foster an integrated approach to sustainable soil and water management by combining geospatial technologies, advanced modeling frameworks, and machine learning techniques.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The EU Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive will require all Member States to establish harmonised soil monitoring systems, assess, classify soil health and report on it, with the final aim of reaching healthy soils by 2050. Transposing these obligations into 27 diverse national contexts raises major scientific challenges: selecting robust indicators and thresholds, designing representative monitoring networks, ensuring data comparability, and integrating legacy datasets. This session invites contributions that critically assess these scientific bottlenecks, present methodological advances (e.g. SOC/clay ratio, soil biodiversity metrics, new sensors), and explore how research can support cost-effective, coherent and long-term monitoring. Comparative insights from EJP SOIL and related projects are especially welcome to highlight opportunities for harmonisation and innovation.

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

Geoscientists play a key role in providing essential information for decision-making processes that consider environmental, social, and economic consequences. Therefore, their responsibilities go beyond scientific analysis. Global challenges such as climate change, resource management, and disaster risk reduction urge geoscientists to extend their role beyond research and ethically engage in public efforts. Geoethics provides a framework to reflect on the ethical, social, and cultural implications of geoscience in both research and practice, guiding responsible action for society and the environment. It also encourages the scientific community to move beyond purely technical solutions, embracing just, inclusive, and transformative approaches to socio-environmental issues.
This session aims to explore, through case studies and discussion, how geoethics can shape responsible behaviors and policies in geosciences. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions addressing a wide spectrum of issues, such as:
• Ethical and social aspects in geosciences, at the interface between geosciences, society, politics, and decision-making processes
• Responsible and sustainable management of georesources (surface and groundwater, soil, rocks, minerals, and energy)
• Ethical and social aspects in geo/environmental education and geoscience communication
• Geoethics in natural hazards, georisks, and disaster reduction
• Ethical and social relevance of geoheritage, geodiversity, geo-conservation, geotourism, and geoparks
• The role of geosciences in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
• Ethical and social issues related to climate change
• Ethical aspects in new geoscience frontiers (such as geoengineering and deep-sea mining)
• Ethical implications in data lifecycle management, big data, and the use of AI in geosciences
• Ethical questions across various geoscience disciplines, including economic geology, engineering geology, hydrogeology, paleontology, forensic geology, medical geology, and planetary geosciences
• Integrity in research and practice in geosciences, publication ethics, and professionalism
• Issues of inclusivity, diversity, harassment, discrimination, and disability in geosciences
• Incorporating Indigenous and local knowledge into geosciences
• Geoscience neo-colonialism
• Ethical and social issues in international geoscience cooperation
• Philosophy of geosciences and the history of geoscientific thought

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!

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.

This short course will train you how to use robust Machine Learning methods to do statistical downscaling of coarse climate model scenarios. A sample dataset will be used: daily surface temperature from one Global Climate Model of the CMIP6 database (historical and future climate time periods), along with a high resolution reanalysis.
Introduction on climate statistical downscaling
Methodology: classical and Machine-Learning based
Steps to perform downscaling
Sample datasets
Results
All material will be made available online, and a sample Jupyter Notebook will be provided.

Soils are interdisciplinary materials, characterized by geological, (micro)biological, biogeochemical, hydrological, and geophysical processes, which take place from the surface down to bedrock. Only by considering these processes down the whole soil profile can we fully anticipate how soils will respond to global change. Research into the spatial and temporal variability of properties from the surface to bedrock, as well as the implications on environment and ecosystem interactions, is crucial for advancing our understanding of the whole soil system.

This interdisciplinary session invites contributions that investigate properties, functions, and services down the whole soil profile. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

1. Mapping and characterising soil thickness and structure using geophysical, geospatial, and field-based approaches.
2. Deep soil biology and geobiology, revealing the distribution of microbial communities and processes, particularly across the soil-bedrock continuum.
3. Biogeochemical cycling, mineral weathering, and nutrient availability with depth.
4. Carbon stocks and stabilisation across soil and bedrock, and the role that subsoil geochemical environments play in carbon dynamics.
5. Hydrological processes through the soil profile, interactions with groundwater and surface waters, and issues of deep soil contamination.

We encourage contributions from a wide range of EGU Divisions, including but not limited to Soil System Sciences, Biogeosciences, Energy Resources and the Environment, Geochemistry Mineralogy Petrology and Volcanology, and Hydrological Sciences. This session aims to inspire cross-disciplinary approaches to understand soil systems as central to Earth’s future.

Soils and subsoils support our land uses such as agriculture, forestry, nature, urban and industrial land use and provides them with essential ecosystem services. However, soil health is currently highly under pressure in Europe, and the soil’s ability to deliver these ecosystem services must be improved to cope with urban challenges such as land take, pollution, erosion and climate change, and meet societal needs such as a healthy living environment, food production and clean water provision.

Mission Soil (EC,2021) recognizes spatial planning as one of the promising practices to support land degradation neutrality. Yet, (sub)soils are literally hidden and unseen in the current practice of and education about planning and design. Policy and decision makers, landowners, and the planning community are often not aware of the opportunities (benefits) and boundary conditions (costs) of (sub)soils.

Spatial planning and design are practices that, when enriched by soil care, can enhance the current status of soils and support societal challenges and needs, while avoiding unwanted trade-offs of towards other areas, generations or functions. To be able to make a transition in spatial planning and design towards healthy soils, a fundamental understanding of both the interaction between the natural system and land use, as well as the current mechanisms, is key.

Natural flood retention measures (NFRMs) such as buffer strips, reforestation, agroforestry, wetland restoration and soil management practices are increasingly recognised as effective and sustainable tools to reduce flood risks while delivering multiple co-benefits for biodiversity, water quality, and climate adaptation. However, their implementation, particularly on privately owned land, raises challenges at the interface of hydrological science, land management, socio-economics, and governance.
This session, organized by the IWRA Land4Flood Task Force, seeks to explore scientific advances, practical experiences, and policy innovations related to natural flood retention on landscape. We welcome contributions that assess hydrological and geomorphological processes, monitoring and modelling approaches, and the effectiveness of NFRMs under climate and land-use changes. Equally, we invite studies addressing barriers and opportunities for adoption, incentives for landowners, and the integration of flood retention measures into broader water management, agricultural, and policy frameworks. This session aims to foster dialogue on how to scale up and mainstream natural flood retention in ways that are both scientifically robust and socially acceptable. We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following subjects:
- Hydrological processes that support NFRMs, focusing on how they improve water retention within the landscape;
- Monitoring, modelling, and assessment of flood retention capacity at multiple scales;
- Effectiveness of soil and land management practices in reducing runoff and flood risk;
- Socio-economic drivers, landowner incentives, and barriers to adoption of NFRMs;
- Governance, policy instruments, and cross-sectoral coordination (agriculture, water management, nature conservation);
- Co-benefits of NFRMs, such as those for biodiversity, soil health and carbon sequestration;
- Case studies and lessons learned from local, regional, and transboundary initiatives and measures.