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.

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 remains one of the most serious threats to soil health, food security, and ecosystem resilience worldwide. But is erosion science rising to this challenge? The broader socio-economic and environmental consequences of erosion-induced soil degradation remain poorly constrained by data and are insufficiently integrated into land management decisions and policy frameworks. Measuring lateral soil fluxes beyond small plots remains technically challenging, while erosion modelling has stagnated and is increasingly dependent on extrapolated empirical equations developed in the 1960s.
This session will foster an open and critical discussion of the major scientific challenges in erosion research – from measurements and models to management and policy – in order to push the field forward. By bringing together conceptual, methodological, and applied perspectives, the session seeks to advance the state of knowledge and identify pathways for future research. We therefore welcome a broad range of contributions, from critical perspectives to applied research. We invite submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following subjects:
- New or improved approaches to measuring and modelling soil erosion;
- Impacts of erosion on soil functions, fertility, water resources, and ecosystem services;
- Socio-economic dimensions of erosion and conservation: adoption, incentives and costs;
- Evidence-based soil conservation practices and nature-based solutions: what works and what doesn’t;
- Translating (uncertain) modelled erosion rates into risk assessments for policymakers and managers;
- New or improved methods for calibrating and testing soil erosion models – 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!)

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).

Understanding and managing sediment dynamics and soil conservation are critical to addressing the challenges posed by climate change, land use transformations, and anthropogenic pressures on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This integrated session focuses on advancing knowledge of sediment transport processes, source tracing, and conservation techniques to inform sustainable land and water management practices.

We welcome contributions that:
*Develop innovative field measurements, sediment sampling, and tracing techniques to quantify soil erosion, redistribution, and sediment transit times over various temporal and spatial scales.
*Explore the impacts of human activities (e.g., deforestation, agricultural expansion, pollutant releases) on sedimentary systems and evaluate environmental responses to anthropogenic forcing using recent sediment records from lakes, reservoirs, and river systems.
* Investigate the design, effectiveness, and long-term sustainability of channel control structures and soil conservation techniques, leveraging cutting-edge remote sensing and multi-temporal monitoring technologies.

This session promotes a multidisciplinary approach, linking methods such as geochemical and isotopic tracers, radioisotope studies, sediment budgeting, and bioengineering to understand sediment delivery and ecosystem resilience. It fosters collaboration between soil scientists, hydrologists, geomorphologists, and practitioners, aiming to address critical knowledge gaps in sediment tracing, catchment restoration, and land-use management. Early career scientists are encouraged to contribute their innovative research to this dialogue.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 organic matter (SOM) is fundamental to biogeochemical cycles and the ecosystem functions provided by soils. Dynamic interactions between organic matter and soil mineral phases are ultimately linked to the persistence and turnover of SOM across scales ranging from microscopic to global. Soil biogeochemical diversity—encompassing physical, chemical, and biological variations—strongly influences root growth, redox conditions, microbial activity, and element fluxes. These interactions affect SOM and nutrient dynamics, greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater quality, and broader ecosystem processes.

This session is dedicated to studies exploring the dynamic interactions, underlying mechanisms, and implications of organo-mineral interactions at multiple scales, as well as their spatial and temporal heterogeneity within the soil system. It includes research on SOM formation pathways (e.g., plant-, rhizosphere-, microbial-, and pyrogenic-derived), its storage in aggregates, and its association with mineral surfaces, as well as their responses to management practices and global change drivers. Furthermore, studies on nutrient and contaminant behavior, greenhouse gas fluxes, carbon storage, mineral transformations, and related processes—using laboratory, field, modeling, or innovative methodological approaches that enhance our understanding of soils and sediments in biogeochemical cycles—are part of this session. We aim to improve our mechanistic understanding of SOM dynamics and discuss new insights and approaches.

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. In addition to organic carbon, focus will be given to inorganic carbon pools in agroecosystems and their response to management practices such as fertilisation, irrigation, liming, or other mineral additions. Alongside this, advances in methods for monitoring and modelling rates of soil carbon loss or carbon sequestration in soils will be discussed, including approaches to quantify and characterise organic and inorganic carbon in calcareous soils. 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.

Understanding the biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C) and other major nutrients (N, P, S) is critical within the Earth’s Critical Zone, which spans from soils and sediments to aquifers and aquatic systems, as changes in these cycles affect greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. These cycles often involve reduction-oxidation (redox) reactions, and regulation of them is particularly crucial in the face of environmental perturbations such as warming, overfertilization, and salinization. As these cycles are dynamic and interlinked, it is often difficult to disentangle the underlying processes and their response to often interactive environmental perturbations. In this session, we invite contributions that investigate the (redox) biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur in the critical zone. We welcome laboratory and field-based studies as well as modeling approaches that explore mechanisms, controls, and process responses under global change scenarios. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Soil structure and its stability determine key soil physical and chemical functions such as water retention, hydraulic and gaseous transport, macropore flow, mechanical impedance, matter transport, nutrient leaching, redox dynamics, and erosion protection. These soil properties form the basis for biological processes, including root penetration, organic matter turnover, and nutrient cycling. The soil pore network governs soil aeration and hydrology and provides habitat for soil biota, which in turn actively reshape the pore architecture. Soil biota, root growth, land management, and abiotic drivers continuously transform the arrangement of pores, minerals, and organic matter, causing soil properties and functions to evolve across spatial and temporal scales.
In managed agricultural and forestry systems, anthropogenic soil compaction remains one of the major soil degradation processes, with long-lasting impacts on soil structure - particularly in deeper horizons where damage is difficult to detect and slow to recover. Increasing machinery size, traffic intensity, and operation under unfavourable moisture conditions further elevate compaction risks. A particular emphasis is placed on characterizing the mechanical properties of the soil and the processes underlying soil structure formation, stabilization, and degradation. This includes interparticle and organic–mineral interactions, pore-water pressure, and matric potential effects on soil deformation, and biological or mechanical drivers of structural change such as root growth, rhizosphere reinforcement, and bioturbation. Integrative studies that combine hydraulic, biological, and mechanical viewpoints are particularly encouraged.
Understanding the processes and feedback that control soil structure and its functional implications is essential for designing climate smart and resilient management strategies. In this session, we invite contributions on the formation and alteration of soil structure and associated soil functions at all spatial and temporal scales. We encourage contributions that integrate complementary measurement techniques (e.g., geophysics, digital image correlation, rheometry, CT/µCT), bridge different spatial scales, propose solutions to mitigate compaction and enhance soil structural resilience. Special focus lies on:
• feedbacks between soil structure dynamics and soil biology,
• impacts of mechanical stress exerted by heavy machinery under land management operations
• mechanical processes shaping pore architecture.

Soils play a fundamental role in sustaining agroecosystem productivity and providing ecosystem services essential for sustainable land and water management. Effective management of soil and water resources requires a detailed understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological processes governing the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. However, measuring soil state variables and hydraulic parameters remains challenging due to nonlinear interactions controlling heat and mass transfer across scales.

Recent advances in Earth observation, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and computational modeling are transforming soil physics by enabling multi-scale monitoring and integrated data–model approaches. The combination of remote sensing, innovative measurement techniques, and process-based models provides new opportunities to estimate soil physical properties, assimilate heterogeneous data sources, quantify uncertainties, and improve the understanding of soil–water–atmosphere interactions.

This session aims to bring together researchers working on measurements, modeling, and data-driven approaches to advance soil physics across scales. It bridges traditional soil physics concepts with emerging technologies, fostering interdisciplinary exchange among soil scientists, hydrologists, and Earth observation researchers.

Topics include, but are not limited to: innovative laboratory and field measurement techniques; infiltration experiments; multi-scale remote sensing of soil moisture and physical properties; preferential flow and macropore processes; coupling AI and machine learning with process-based models; data assimilation, inverse modeling, pedotransfer functions, and data fusion; numerical and analytical models accounting for complex soil processes; uncertainty analysis; and case studies supporting climate impact assessments, sustainable land management, and hydrological prediction. Early-career and interdisciplinary contributions are especially encouraged.

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

Landslides and slope instabilities induced by rainfall or snowmelt 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. Furthermore, the prediction of such locations is of great importance for zonation purposes and for the design of early warning systems to prevent human casualties. Recent innovations in monitoring and modelling offer new avenues for investigating these multifaceted processes.

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.
• Effects of climatic global changes and land use on the susceptibility and hazards towards shallow landslides.
• Field hydrological monitoring for the assessment of main pore-pressure build-up areas and triggering conditions of shallow landslides.

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.

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 soils by plastic is a global issue of increasing concern to scientific communities and the public alike. Soils are 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, monitoring, laboratory, and modelling studies from urban settings, agroecosystems, and soil interfaces between different environmental compartments, covering all scales from nano- to macroplastics, with a focus on:
• Detection of plastics in soil systems: methods for sampling, detection, and quantification of plastic pollution in soils
• Distribution and source apportionment: monitoring efforts and source apportionment, spatio-temporal patterns
• Transport dynamics of plastics: transport of plastics and their co-transport with other contaminants from soil to other environmental compartments
• 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
• 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.

One of the main problems facing society today is soil degradation and contamination. Soil quality affects environmental and human health: directly, by regulating the retention, immobilisation, or mobilisation of pollutants and thus controlling exposure pathways; and indirectly, by shaping water quality and food security through its effects on infiltration, runoff generation, and nutrient cycling. However, soil quality decline goes beyond contamination and stems from interacting processes such as erosion, organic carbon loss, salinization/sodification, compaction and reduced infiltration, surface sealing/crusting, structural degradation, biodiversity loss, and landscape alteration. These factors collectively weaken vegetation performance and reduce the resilience of ecosystems.
Although traditional field-based methods for evaluating soil degradation and contamination, and assessing restoration outcomes are essential, they are labour-intensive, time-consuming, and spatially constrained. Integrating remote sensing with in-situ observations and modelling enhances the ability to map degradation, identify hotspots and drivers, and quantify recovery trajectories. This session combines the in-situ evaluation of the relationship between soil quality and environmental and human health, via exposure to contaminants, with the use of remote and proximal sensing to monitor and assess soil degradation and its impacts on environmental and human health risk. We invite colleagues to present their research and to establish new cross-cutting, multidisciplinary collaborations aimed at proposing solutions and identifying soil health–related risks, as well as risks to environmental and human health. We welcome contributions using UAV, airborne, and satellite data together with in-situ and proximal sensors (DRS, XRF, EM, GPR), including: (i) indicator retrieval (e.g., SOC, texture, moisture, vegetation stress, contaminant proxies); (ii) bare-soil compositing and time-series workflows; (iii) physics- (or process-) based versus machine-learning approaches; (iv) sensor and data fusion; (v) spectral libraries and transferability; and (vi) case studies tracking degradation and recovery trajectories under diverse management actions, amendments, mitigation, or remediation strategies. The aim is to develop scalable, reproducible workflows that produce decision-ready outputs for assessing land degradation, planning restoration, and reducing environmental and human health risks.

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.

Soil erosion and the subsequent transfer of sediments and associated contaminants, including nutrients, heavy metals, pesticides, and organic compounds, are key drivers of water quality degradation, ecosystem functioning, and biogeochemical cycles. Intensifying climate extremes and land use pressures are accelerating erosion processes and altering sediment source to sink pathways, highlighting the need for integrated soil and water management approaches.
This session focuses on the continuum from soil erosion on hillslopes and agricultural lands, through sediment transport within river networks, to deposition and transformation in floodplains, lakes, and reservoirs. Contributions addressing physical, chemical, and biological processes controlling erosion, sediment connectivity, transport, storage, and contaminant fate across spatial and temporal scales are particularly encouraged.

A key highlight of this session is the application of next generation tools to address these challenges. We particularly welcome contributions showcasing:
- Innovative Monitoring: Remote sensing using Sentinel and Landsat missions, high resolution field sensors, tracers, and novel low cost or open-source measurement techniques for erosion and sediment dynamics.
- Advanced Modelling: Process based and empirical models such as SWAT and InVEST, combined with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing platforms including Google Earth Engine to improve prediction, scaling, and uncertainty assessment.
- System Dynamics: Sediment budgets, archive analysis, source attribution, and the influence of human interventions such as hydropower, river regulation, flood management, and soil conservation policies.
- Ecosystem Impacts: Responses of riparian, hyporheic, riverine, and lacustrine ecosystems to changing erosion rates, sediment fluxes, and contaminant loads.
This interdisciplinary session aims to bring together soil scientists, geomorphologists, hydrologists, ecologists, and data scientists to advance understanding and management of erosion driven sediment and contaminant dynamics in a changing environment.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 valorisation of agro-livestock and forestry residues offers a major opportunity to improve soil health, enhance agricultural productivity, and support climate change mitigation within a circular economy framework. By converting organic waste streams into value-added soil amendments through processes such as composting, co-composting, pyrolysis, or anaerobic digestion, agricultural systems can move from linear resource use towards more resilient and regenerative soil management strategies, in line with the objectives of the EU Mission Soil.

By integrating waste valorisation and nutrient management perspectives, this session aims to bring together researchers, early-career scientists, and practitioners to exchange knowledge and advance sustainable soil management in circular agroecosystems. Emphasis will be placed on initiatives that translate scientific advances into tangible practices for sustainable agriculture and resilient agroecosystems.

Within this broader context, the session also addresses nutrient cycling and soil remediation through the use of organic amendments and chars, including biochar. These materials can contribute to improved nutrient retention and use efficiency, reduced nutrient losses and emissions, and enhanced soil–water–plant interactions, depending on feedstock, processing methods, application rates, and site-specific conditions.

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 transformation methods (composting, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, etc).
• Investigations on emissions, volatilization, and leaching.
• Agro waste valorization for a sustainable agriculture.

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.

Rapid changes in climate and land use are placing increasing pressure on ecosystems such as forests, agricultural landscapes, rangelands and wetlands, where soils, vegetation, and landforms are tightly interconnected. These pressures drive soil degradation, shifts in vegetation patterns, and losses of essential ecosystem services, often involving nonlinear responses and thresholds in ecosystem stability.
This session focuses on understanding the processes that govern soil–vegetation–landforms interactions, soil resource conservation, and landscape resilience under climatic and human disturbances. We welcome theoretical, modelling, and empirical studies addressing, at different spatial scales, soil degradation processes—such as erosion, salinisation, desertification, nutrient loss, and pollution—as well as the spatial organization of soils and vegetation that shapes ecosystem function and stability including influence and impact on societal aspects.
We also invite contributions on sustainable and restorative practices, including conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, soil amendments, erosion and salinity control, and other nature‑based solutions that enhance soil health, water retention, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Approaches combining methodologies such as modelling, long‑term observations, remote sensing, participatory methods, and policy frameworks are particularly encouraged.
Overall, the session aims to advance an integrated understanding of how soils, vegetation, and landforms coevolve under global change, and how sustainable management can support long‑term soil conservation, productivity, and multifunctionality.

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.

Forests worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges. While they provide critically important ecosystem services such as carbon storage, flood protection, clean air, local cooling, or maintaining biodiversity, their resilience is increasingly put under pressure by intensifying disturbances such as fires, storms, droughts, or pests. Mitigation measures such as afforestation, forest restoration, forest protection and innovative forest management have been promoted, but their efficiency and impact on ecosystem services are ambiguous and are location dependent.
Growing evidence indicates a decrease in the carbon sink strength and storage capacity of forest ecosystems in recent years. Furthermore, forest management strategies primarily optimized for climate change mitigate might, in certain contexts, conflict with biodiversity conservation objectives, and vice versa. Thus, identifying pathways for sustainable and resilient forestry is a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor task and needs an understanding of the biophysical, social, ecological, economic, and governance implications. These issues are central to the European Green Deal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health strategy and are also at the heart of the EU H2020 CLIMB-FOREST (2022-2027) project (https://www.climbforest.eu/ ).
In this session, we will explore how to design and implement climate- and biodiversity-smart forestry, aiming for long-term sustainability and multifunctionality. We are covering the following topics
• management history, biomass production, carbon gains and losses
• biogeochemical and biophysical properties of forest stands
• interactions with atmospheric chemistry, e.g. aerosols and BVOC production
• bioeconomic aspects and wood production
• scenarios for alternative future forest management
• Modeling past and future climate impacts on forests and the delivery of different ecosystem services under different mitigation measures
• Insights, tools, and practices enabling the successful implementation of mitigation measures and enhancement of social-ecological systems’ resilience
• Governance or agent-based models to improve the societal and environmental benefits of mitigation measures
• The implications of forest-based mitigation measures on enhancing forest resilience against major disturbances and extreme events
• Methods and tools for decision and adaptation support in the forestry, considering multiple stakeholders and multifunctional perspectives

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.

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.

Sustainable soil and land management represents a critical challenge in the context of climate change, primarily due to the high spatial heterogeneity of landscapes and the complex temporal scales that govern soil functions and ecosystem dynamics. To address these challenges, integrated modelling approaches are essential to bridge scales, disciplines, and data sources, effectively linking mechanistic physical understanding with data-driven insights. Observations serve as the cornerstone of understanding pedo-hydrological processes, and while modern technological advancements provide a wealth of information, integrating these diverse measurement sources into data-driven and physics-informed models remains a significant hurdle in vadose zone hydrology and soil science in general. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning and AI have opened new pathways for modelling complex Earth system processes, offering cutting-edge applications to characterize soil biogeophysical and hydrothermal properties while predicting the transport of water, heat, and solutes. By assimilating data from field sensors to remote sensing platforms into physics-informed models and digital twin frameworks, soil processes can be simulated across multiple spatial scales. This integration enables more accurate and reliable predictions of critical issues such as climate change impacts, contamination, salinization, erosion, agricultural practices, and land-use change. This interdisciplinary approach-coupling models to represent interactions between soil, microbes, plants, and the atmosphere—not only highlights the promise and limits of integrated strategies but also provides a robust foundation for the resilient, sustainable management of soil and water resources across both agroecosystems and natural landscapes.

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.

Soil health is a pivotal concept for assessing the capacity of soils to sustain ecosystem functions and resilience, deliver ecosystem services, and support climate chance adaptation and contrast, food security and biodiversity.
Major efforts were made to define soil health, identifying indicators, and developing monitoring scheme to support management and policy at various scales. However, significant challenges remain in indicator choice and integration, methodological harmonisation, data interoperability, scalability. Also, effective uptake by practitioners and decision-makers has been scarce. Transdisciplinary indices are required to integrate biological, chemical and physical aspects which can produce both leading, concurrent and lagging indicators. At the one time, these indices should be scaled in space, time and their temporal significance, and their integration compared to broad system indicators such as life cycle assessment indicators at the farm, forest stand, landscape and regional level.
This session brings together contributions that address soil health from complementary perspectives, spanning conceptual frameworks, indicator development, measurement techniques, modelling approaches, data infrastructures, and applications in real-world contexts. By explicitly linking indicator-centred and practice-centred approaches, the session seeks to advance a coherent and operational understanding of soil health that is scientifically robust, comparable across regions and land uses, and usable in monitoring, planning and policy processes.
The session is structured around six interconnected thematic blocks, covering the full pathway from reference frameworks and indicators to harmonised monitoring systems and societal uptake. Particular attention is given to comparability across scales, integration of physical, chemical and biological indicators, emerging measurement technologies, FAIR data principles, and the translation of soil health assessments into actionable knowledge.

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.

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 soil organisms (such as plants) and their environment shape terrestrial fluxes, biochemical cycles, and agro-ecosystem productivity. Life in soil can actively modify its physical environment to optimize growth and reproductive conditions. However, we lack detailed knowledge of the underlying mechanisms that shape these adaptive modifications and the feedback between their drivers. Furthermore, we do not understand how these interactions affect access to soil resources and processes, such as plant growth and bioturbation. The main challenge stems from the inherent complexity of biophysical and biochemical processes in soils and plants across multiple scales.
Experimental techniques such as non-invasive imaging and three-dimensional root system modeling tools have deepened our understanding of water and solute transport processes in the soil-plant system. Quantitative approaches that integrate across disciplines and scales serve as stepping stones to advance our understanding of fundamental biophysical processes at the interface between soils and plants.
This session targets research investigating soil-plant-related resource transfer processes and contributions linking biological processes and soil physics across different scales (from the rhizosphere to the global scale) and welcomes scientists from multiple disciplines encompassing soil and plant sciences across natural, as well as agricultural systems. We are specifically inviting contributions on the following topics:
- Bridging the gap between biologically and physically oriented research in soil and plant sciences.
- Measuring and modeling of soil-plant hydraulics, water and solute fluxes through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum across scales.
- Identification of plant strategies to better access and use resources from the soil, including under abiotic stress(es).
- Novel experimental and modeling techniques assessing belowground processes such as root growth, root water, and nutrient uptake, root exudation, microbial interactions, and soil structure formation.
- Mechanistic understanding of plant water use and gas exchange regulation under drought and their implementation in Earth system models.
The aim of this session is to highlight the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to address current and future challenges in soil and plant science and to foster scientific exchange across disciplines.

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.

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.

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.

Geoscientists play a key role in providing essential information in decision-making processes that consider environmental, social, and economic consequences of geoscience work. Therefore, their responsibilities extend beyond scientific analysis alone. Global challenges, such as climate change, resource management, and disaster risk reduction, push geoscientists to expand their role beyond research and to engage ethically in public efforts.
Geoethics provides a framework for reflecting on the ethical, social, and cultural implications of geoscience in research, practice, and education, guiding responsible action for society and the environment. It also encourages the scientific community to move beyond purely technical solutions by embracing just, inclusive, and transformative approaches to socio-environmental issues.
Furthermore, science is inseparable from social and geopolitical contexts. These conditions shape what research is funded, whose knowledge is valued, with whom we collaborate, and who has access to conferences. As Earth and planetary scientists, we must consider the human and environmental consequences of our work. This is especially true in Earth observation, where many satellites have both scientific and military applications, and where scientific tools have at times enabled ecocide and resource exploitation under neocolonial systems.
This session will offer insights and reflections across a wide range of topics, from theoretical considerations to case studies, foster awareness and discussion of sensitive issues at the geoscience–society interface and explore how geoethics can guide responsible behavior and policies in the geosciences.

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.