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.