Announcements
ISMC General Assembly
The ISMC General Assembly was held on the 10th of October 2025 from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM (Berlin time as a virtual Zoom conference.
Agenda
Opening, volunteer for protocol and approval of the Agenda
Report of the activities 2024-2025
Report of the finances 2024
Approval of the finances 2024
Outlook activities 2025
Information for the Election of treasurer and ISMC coordinator December 2025
Working Group Reports
Any other business
The minutes of the general assembly can be found here.
𝗔 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗜𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗶𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗦𝗠𝗖
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the 𝗦𝗼𝗶𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 within ISMC, a new community of researchers, modelers, and data scientists who are passionate about advancing model-based, AI-assisted, and data-driven approaches in soil science.
𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲:
To bring together people and ideas that can help shape the future of soil intelligence—the integration of soil data, domain knowledge, process-based models, and AI to create smarter, more adaptive, and more transparent representations of soil systems.
We’ll be organizing workshops, webinars, and collaborative projects that connect science and practice—promoting open, reproducible, and innovative ways of understanding and managing soils.
If this sounds like your kind of work (or curiosity!), we’d love to have you join us.
👉 Fill out this short form to express your interest and become part of the community:
Let’s build soil intelligence together!
For any questions, feel free to reach out to Mehdi Rahmati (mehdirmti@gmail.com) or Sarem Norouzi (saram.nrz@gmail.com).
ISMC A Brief history by Harry Vereecken
Almost ten years ago, the idea arose to establish the International Soil Modelling Consortium, ISMC based on a review paper on soil modelling that appeared in VZJ in 2016 (Vereecken et al., 2016) and a first conference held in Austin, Texas, 2016. Its motivation was to gather experts from all over the world to advance modelling of soil systems, to support early career researchers but also to reach out to the Earth Science research community with the aim to advance descriptions of soil processes in Earth system models, crop growth models and biodiversity models, just to name a few.
A first step in direction was the establishment of the SoilWat initiative fostering the interaction between the soil modelling community and GEWEX in the field of soil-plant-atmosphere interactions with a focus on water related processes. In 2020, Fatichi et al., wrote a paper on the important role of soil structure in the modelling of land surface processes. It showed that soil structure is neglected in these models and that accounting for it has a major impact on the energy and water balance components at ecosystem level. It also made clear that we as soil scientists need to tackle this challenge our selves as the PTFs that we are using do not account for soil structure at all. Only 1% of the available data in the databases used to develop PTFs allow to analyze the impact of soil structure on hydraulic properties. Recent work by Bonetti et al. (2021) aimed at including the effect of structure caused by biotic processes on soil hydraulic properties.
In recent years the activities of ISMC have expanded beyond these first initiatives with many working groups in place to address key challenges in soil modelling. We still have a long road ahead: sustained collaboration with the Earth System Modelling community is needed to integrate improved soil-process representations and thereby sharpen our understanding and prediction of climate- and land-use-change impacts on the Earth System.
Why You Should Join the International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC) – A Call to students and Early Career Scientists
Soil is fundamental to many of Earth’s critical processes, services and cycles such as the water and carbon cycles, climate feedbacks, ecosystem health, water resources management and food production. In addressing these grand challenges such as climate change, land degradation, and food security, advanced process‑based soil models serve as a powerful tool to understand, predict, and to help managing our soils in response to human pressures and evolving environmental conditions. The International Soil Modeling Consortium (ISMC) leads this initiative. Here’s why you, as an early career scientist, should consider becoming part of ISMC and how this decision can significantly impact your career.
Services provided by ISMC
ISMC provides early career scientists with opportunities for global collaboration and Networking. It brings together soils and Earth system modelers, field experimentalists, remote sensing experts, and policy‑oriented scientists from around the world. You’ll meet people who are authorities in their field and who will challenge your knowledge, concepts, ideas and assumptions, ultimately fostering innovative ideas and potential collaborations.
ISMC will provide access to shared model codes, datasets and intercomparison exercises through the model and data portal and the various working groups. This enables you to build upon, rather than recreate, current advances.
Engaging in ISMC activities (workshops, publications, intercomparisons) provides exposure to senior scholars and institutions. Your contributions can appear in joint papers, reports, and have an impact on the soil modeling community globally.
But ISMC will also assist you in your skill development. Regardless of your expertise in fieldwork, data analytics, coding, or theory, ISMC offers opportunities to deepen your modeling capabilities through participation in the ISMC science panels and working groups such as mathematics of soil processes, pedotransfer functions, global soil carbon modelling, biophysics and soil structure, thermal properties, soil and roots but also the use of AI technologies. As modeling becomes pivotal to global climate and land use policies, standardized best/good practices are essential. Participation in ISMC enables you to shape how soil models are developed, validated, and used responsibly.
The significance of Early Career Scientists to ISMC
There are three main motivations for ISMC to foster the participation of early career scientists. Firstly, you bring energy, creativity, and new ideas. As young scientists you often see unconventional connections, are more open to try new methods, and push boundaries of existing approaches. Secondly, many early career scientists possess robust quantitative, data science, or coding capabilities essential for soil modeling. Your skills can help modernize models, improve computational efficiency, and facilitate integration of big data & machine learning. Finally, ISMC is building foundations now for soil model intercomparisons, community‐agreed protocols, and major initiatives. Being part of the ground floor helps you shape both the science and how the community operates in the next 5–10 years.
The value to your career
ISMC provides you with a competitive advantage as you will be involved in an international consortium with leading experts in soil modelling. They provide you with mentorship, feedback, and collaboration. Being part of ISMC will put your work in a larger context and scope. As an early career scientist, you are eligible for the ISMC Early Career Award. It is issued biennial for outstanding scientific achievements made in the field of soil and vadose zone sciences. The Early Career ISMC Presentation Award honours outstanding presentations throughout the ISMC conference.
How You Can Get Involved
Here are concrete steps:
- Join as a member — attend ISMC webinars/workshops, subscribe to newsletters.
- Engage in working groups and intercomparison exercises — contribute data, help run models, or assist with analysis.
- Present your work — propose sessions (oral/poster) connected to soil modeling at conferences, aligned with ISMC’s agendas and at the two-yearly ISMC conference.
- Co‑author publications — contribute to community‐led papers on benchmarking, model evaluation, or consensus statements.
- Share tools & datasets — publish/use open datasets, share model code, contribute to community repositories.
References
Bonetti, S., Wei, Z. & Or, D. A framework for quantifying hydrologic effects of soil structure across scales. Commun Earth Environ 2, 107 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00180-0
Fatichi, S., D. Or, et al., 2020. Soil structure is an important omission in Earth System Models. Nat Commun 11, 522. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14411-z
Vereecken et al., 2016, Modeling Soil Processes: Review, Key Challenges, and New Perspectives, Vadose Zone Journal (2016) 15 (5): https://doi.org/10.2136/vzj2015.09.0131
Featured Paper
Do you want your paper featured?
Please share your recent paper if you want to be featured in the ISMC newsletter. With your contributions, we will select one paper to be featured in every newsletter. Submission can be done here.
autoRA: An Algorithm to Automatically Delineate Reference Areas
— A Case Study to Map Soil Classes in Bahia, Brazil
The reference area (RA) approach has been frequently used in soil surveying and mapping projects, since it allows for reduced costs. However, a crucial point in using this approach is the choice or delineation of an RA, which can compromise the accuracy of prediction models. In this study, an innovative algorithm that delineates RA (autoRA—automatic reference areas) is presented, and its efficiency is evaluated in Sátiro Dias, Bahia, Brazil. autoRA integrates multiple environmental covariates (e.g., geomorphology, geology, digital elevation models, temperature, precipitation, etc.) using the Gower’s Dissimilarity Index to capture landscape variability more comprehensively. One hundred and two soil profiles were collected under a specialist’s manual delineation to establish baseline mapping soil taxonomy. We tested autoRA coverages ranging from 10% to 50%, comparing them to RA manual delineation and a conventional “Total Area” (TA) approach. Environmental heterogeneity was insufficiently sampled at lower coverages (autoRA at 10–20%), resulting in poor classification accuracy (0.11–0.14). In contrast, larger coverages significantly improved performance: 30% yielded an accuracy of 0.85, while 40% and 50% reached 0.96. Notably, 40% struck the best balance between high accuracy (kappa = 0.65) and minimal redundancy, outperforming RA manual delineation (accuracy = 0.75) and closely matching the best TA outcomes. These findings underscore the advantage of applying an automated, diversity-driven strategy like autoRA before field campaigns, ensuring the representative sampling of critical environmental gradients to improve DSM workflows. More information can be found here.
Co-Application of Bokashi and Biochar Alleviates Water Stress, Improves Soil Fertility and Enhances Wheat Production Under Water-Deficit Conditions
Water stress and nutrient stress are major limiting factors affecting crop productivity. Biochar-based organic fertilizers improve soil nutrient availability, water use efficiency (WUE), and crop yields under these adverse conditions. This study investigated the mechanistic effects of biochar–bokashi mixtures under a controlled glasshouse pot experiment on soil fertility, available nutrients, soil moisture, plant water use efficiency (PWUE), and wheat yield parameters under three moisture levels. Four treatments were included, (1) a control, (2) bokashi only, (3) 1% biochar + bokashi, and (4) 2% biochar + bokashi, under 30% (IR30), 50% (IR50), and 60% (IR60) field capacity, totaling twelve treatments in a completely randomized design with three replications. The combined bokashi–biochar application significantly (p < 0.05) improved growth parameters and yields, including plant height, number of fertile tillers (NFT), number of spikes (NS), spike length (SL), 1000-grain weight, biological yield (BY), root biomass, and grain yield (GY), compared to the control and bokashi-only treatments. Bokashi with 1% biochar exhibited superior agronomic performance over the other treatments, including 2% biochar. Biochar addition enhanced soil moisture and PWUE across irrigation levels. Bokashi–biochar treatments under IR30 outperformed the control and bokashi-only treatments under IR60, highlighting biochar’s effectiveness in alleviating water stress and increasing yields. Moreover, co-application significantly increased soil pH while enhancing the organic carbon, total nitrogen, available phosphorous and exchangeable potassium nutrient levels, which positively correlated with yield. Bokashi–biochar mixtures have been proven to be an effective strategy to enhance soil fertility, increase soil moisture to alleviate water stress and support sustainable wheat production under water- and nutrient-limited conditions. More information can be found here.
Featured Soil Modeler (Sinikka Paulus)
Understanding the role of soil’s sorptive potential at large scales
I am Sinikka Paulus, a Postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. My research focuses on soil–atmosphere interactions, with a particular interest in how dry soils adsorb atmospheric water vapor. During my PhD, I explored this process using large weighing lysimeters, Eddy Covariance, and other biometeorological time series linking soil and atmospheric moisture dynamics.
I actually started in this field already during my Bachelor’s, where I worked as a research assistant measuring and modeling soil gas diffusion, first with greenhouse gases and later with water stable isotopes. Today, what fascinates me most is how hygroscopic surface properties and surface cooling drive condensation of water vapor on ecosystem surfaces. While the basic mechanisms are well understood, we still know surprisingly little about their long-term dynamics or their role in ecosystem functioning. Yet, they are highly relevant in water- and nutrient-limited systems, and likely to shift under future climate change. That challenge is what motivates my current research.
- How did you first become interested in soil modelling and learn about ISMC?
When working with measurements, it’s crucial to perform multiple sanity checks to ensure that what you record truly reflects the variable of interest, without interference from leaks or material emissions that could compromise data quality. In my experience, modeling plays a key role in these checks, particularly for soil gas transport and similar processes. I became familiar with the ISMC during the GEWEX SoilWat Workshop in Reading, where I also learned about the valuable databases that ISMC provides and curates.
-Can you share with us your current research focus?
Currently, I am investigating how the soil’s sorptive potential affects water vapor fluxes beyond the soil surface, as observed in Eddy Covariance measurements taken meters above the ground. One challenge is that most Eddy Covariance sites lack detailed data on soil texture or hydraulic properties. To address this, we introduced a scale-emergent concept that describes the apparent behavior of the latent heat flux direction at the ecosystem scale, which we hypothesize originates from pore-scale relationships between relative humidity and volumetric water content. Our approach is physically grounded while providing a practical framework for large-scale analysis.
Through this work, we identified an emergent ecosystem-scale relationship between volumetric water content, atmospheric relative humidity, and latent heat flux direction, highlighting the influence of soil sorptive potential on water vapor gradients. Although this effect is not typically considered at the ecosystem scale, our results show that it clearly emerges in dryland Eddy Covariance data—a significant finding, given that drylands cover about 40% of the global land area.
- Please tell us briefly how your research could contribute to ISMC Science Panel’s activities? Or the other way around, how do you wish ISMC science panels help/support your research activities?
Although I am not yet very familiar with the specific activities of the ISMC Science Panels, I plan to engage with the new working groups that may be established following the Reading meeting. I hope that my research can contribute to improving model simulations of condensation near the Earth’s surface. It is exciting to see that measurable functional relationships at small scales can emerge at the ecosystem scale. By investigating these relationships further, I aim to help qualitatively verify whether large-scale models can accurately capture surface condensation processes, and I hope that openly shared data can help to parameterize models in this regard.
I also believe that process-based models and hybrid models can play to their strengths here if they are parameterized appropriately. Interestingly, my results show that ML models, although trained on the same data, do not necessarily capture adsorption because the fluxes are small and the models train on the mean value. This shows that with an understanding of soil hydrology and micrometeorology, process-based models can still be superior to ML models.
- What resources or skills would you recommend that early career members of ISMC should acquire? And how can ISMC help and support early career members in this regard?
It is very easy early in the career to get overwhelmed by the amount of data and information. Especially when a PhD project is not strictly tailored to a specific research question or experiment.
I strongly recommend reading standard books before diving into the landscape of papers to get a solid understanding of what is the state of the art, how fields have evolved and where are the missing links. Importantly, don’t try to understand everything but concentrate on one thing and then become really well-read at this aspect. The rest comes by itself. Also – go outside, talk to people at conferences to get an understanding of the knowledge that is not written down but diffuses through the community. This is only possible when talking to people. Don’t be scared to ask questions, researchers love to talk - especially when it is about the topics that excite them.
