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ISMC News 16 December 2024

Announcements + Featured Paper + Featured Soil Modeller + Job announcement

Announcements

 

New ISMC co-chair elected

Atilla Nemes has been elected as a new ISMC co-chair during the executive-board meeting 1st of November 2024. Martine van der Ploeg will be the outgoing chair. ISMC thanks Martine for her outstanding contribution to ISMC over the last years, including the organization of the 2nd ISMC conference in Wageningen, Netherlands in 2018 but also for her fantastic work in the executive board, as working group lead, co-author in ISMC publications,  and as an ISMC chair.  

Conference Session

The session SSS10.2 "Measuring and modeling vadose zone processes: challenges and perspectives" at the upcoming EGU General Assembly 2025 seeks for submission. The conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, from 27 April  to 2 May 2025. More details can be found at the EGU website or by scanning the QR code below. 

Call for data input of TDR measurements

Following the TDR review papers published in Advances in Agronomy (He H, Zou W, Jones SB, Robinson DA, Horton R, Dyck M, et al. Critical review of the models used to determine soil water content using TDR-measured apparent permittivity. In: Sparks DL, editor. Advances in Agronomy. Advances in Agronomy. 182: Academic Press; 2023. p. 169-219. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.agron.2023.06.004), Hailong He would like to invite you to contribute your TDR measurements for a TDR dataset, based on which he and the group could wrap up a data paper and also try to calibrate current or develop new empirical/physical/machine learning models for the dielectric permittivity ~ water content relationships of unfrozen and frozen soils and more. Please using the prepared excel spreadsheet template for the data input (onedrive for download: Dataset template for TDR measurements2.xlsx) and send your data to Dr. Hailong He (hailong.he@hotmail.com). Please feel free to circulate the template to your contacts who may have such data, all contributors will be invited to coauthor the data paper and other related publications.

Awards for ISMC members 2024

Jan Vanderborght from the Agrosphere Institute (IBG-3) at Jülich was appointed as a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). Congratulations on your achievement and contribution to soil science, hydrology, and soil modeling. Click here to learn more.

On our own account

The newsletter team and ISMC wish you a pleasant holiday and all the best for the next year. ISMC wants to thank those people responsible for the newsletter: Sagar Gautam, Yijian Zeng, Martine van der Ploeg, Attila Nemes, and Lutz Weihermüller.

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

Learning Constitutive Relations From Soil Moisture Data via Physically Constrained Neural Networks

The constitutive relations of the Richardson-Richards equation encode the macroscopic properties of soil water retention and conductivity. These soil hydraulic functions are commonly represented by models with a handful of parameters. The limited degrees of freedom of such soil hydraulic models constrain our ability to extract soil hydraulic properties from soil moisture data via inverse modeling. We present a new free-form approach to learning the constitutive relations using physically constrained neural networks. We implemented the inverse modeling framework in a differentiable modeling framework, JAX, to ensure scalability and extensibility. For efficient gradient computations, we implemented implicit differentiation through a nonlinear solver for the Richardson-Richards equation. We tested the framework against synthetic noisy data and demonstrated its robustness against varying magnitudes of noise and degrees of freedom of the neural networks. We applied the framework to soil moisture data from an upward infiltration experiment and demonstrated that the neural network-based approach was better fitted to the experimental data than a parametric model and that the framework can learn the constitutive relations.

More information can be found here.

 

Featured Soil Modeller (Mikołaj Piniewski)

Hydrological extremes under climate change and how to mitigate their effects

Mikołaj Piniewski is a hydrologist working as an Associate Professor at the Department of Hydrology, Meteorology and Water Management of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW, Poland). He did his PhD in hydrology, focusing on watershed modelling, in 2012. He was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers for a stay at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK, Germany) between 2014 and 2017. His main research interests are hydrological modelling, climate change impact assessment, floods and droughts, mitigation measures and water resources management.

Please tell us briefly about yourself and your research interest.

Back in the 1990s, my two favourite school subjects were mathematics and geography, especially physical geography. A few years later, during my undergraduate studies at the University of Warsaw, I realised that hydrology is the discipline in which my strong mathematical competencies can prove most useful. That is why, after doing a Master's degree in applied maths, I switched with a PhD topic to a more practice-oriented field, that is, mathematical modelling of hydrological processes using computer models. I became particularly interested in modelling the effects of climate change, which, at that time (late 2000s), was still in its infancy.


How did you first become interested in soil modelling and learn about ISMC?

The very first task I got from my PhD supervisor after enrolling on a doctoral programme at SGGW in 2007 was to learn the Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. At that time, I first became exposed to the modelling of soil water transport at the watershed scale. I spent a lot of time on my PhD to prepare as good soil input data for my model as possible. At that time, access to high or even medium-quality data was extremely limited, and one had to seek creative solutions to avoid the GIGO syndrome. Later on, when drought became a hot topic in Central Europe, I became interested in drought modelling and received funding for a project on integrated modelling of agricultural and hydrological droughts. In one of the studies, we showed that SWAT could capture major soil moisture deficit and excess events over a long simulation period at a national scale. In another study, we demonstrated the added value of using remotely sensed soil moisture data in SWAT calibration. I am delighted that my former PhD student, Dr Mohammadreza Einikarimkandi, is now diving deeper into the topic with new ideas for hybrid process-based and machine-learning approaches for modelling droughts.
I recently learnt about the ISMC from my good friend, who advertised this community to me as diverse, vivid and open to new collaborations. Indeed, I was attracted by the website, which has plenty of information on events, special issues, ongoing projects, valuable resources and networking opportunities. I also liked its reasonably informal structure compared to other, more famous science societies.

Can you share with us your current research focus?

We can see and experience each year what is happening with more frequent and/or severe hydrological extremes, primarily explained by climate change. In my research, I am trying to better understand how and why these extremes are undergoing changes and how we can increase the reliability of the models predicting them. I am also investigating how mitigation measures (NSWRMs, NBS, BMPs, etc.) could help reduce the negative impacts of floods and droughts. Being currently engaged in three EU Horizon projects: OPTAIN, Nordbalt-Ecosafe and SpongeScapes, I collaborate on these topics with many European researchers.
 

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?

For example, within the OPTAIN project, we recently developed new tools that assist SWAT users in soil model input data preparation, one of the most tedious tasks in the modelling workflow. Although tailored for SWAT, some features could be easily adapted for other models. We are also working on a paper developing and testing new methods for converting soil particle size distribution between different classification systems. A known obstacle in international soil-related research, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, is that different countries measure particle-size distribution by different standards and often represent it according to different classification systems. It creates headaches for modellers. I strongly believe our research closely aligns with the mission of the DO-Link science panel of the ISMC.

 

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?

In retrospect, when I was in the early career stage, I benefitted greatly from actively participating in various forms of international collaboration. Presenting one’s own results at conferences, attending workshops and summer schools, getting involved in international projects, all such little activities sum up to something bigger that shapes a researcher’s career in the long run.

Changing the topic, you have an interesting story to share about your recent discovery of plagiarism cases in peer-review reports. Could you share it briefly with the ISMC community?

Of course. Last year I encountered some suspicious writing in peer-review reports of my own paper. Upon reviewing the feedback from three reviewers, I noticed that the two of them were clearly lacking in specificity and substance, to say it mildly. I immediately conducted a thorough Google search to identify specific phrases used by the reviewers. Surprisingly, I found comments identical to those already available in multiple open-access review reports online, mainly on MDPI and PLOS publishers’ websites. I assembled a team to dig deeper into the subject, which resulted in a more systematic search of text duplication in peer review reports. We identified exact quotes duplicated across 50 publications and 19 different journals from diverse disciplines. We had no doubt it was only the tip of the iceberg. The study was published this year in Scientometrics and featured in Nature Index.
I know so many people in the ISMC community are actively publishing, making peer reviews, or acting on journal editorial boards, so I thought, in the first place, it’s important to raise awareness about such malpractice undermining our profession. Secondly, it could be valuable to survey ISMC members regarding their experience with plagiarism in research (either papers or peer-reviews).

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