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