Announcements

Im Memoriam Reinder Feddes

On 13 January 2025, emeritus professor Reinder Feddes passed away at the age of 85 after a long illness. Reinder Feddes put the field of Agrohydrology on the international scientific map. With his passing, we lose a great scientist and dear friend.

Reinder grew up in the peat colonies of Overijssel, an area with nutrient-poor and erosion-prone soils. During secondary school, it became clear that he wanted to study something with ‘water’ in ‘Wageningen’ or ‘Delft’. He eventually chose to study Tropical Rural Engineering in Wageningen, which included study trips to Mexico and the arid Mid-West of the US. In 1966, he graduated and married Foky van Klaarbergen. The Institute for Rural Engineering and Water Management (ICW) offered Reinder the opportunity to investigate the influence of groundwater levels on crop yields with lysimeters. This was challenging work, in which the interactions between water, soil, plant and atmosphere had to be established. These agrohydrological interactions eventually became the common thread in his scientific work. In 1971, Reinder processed his experimental data into a PhD thesis. During a sabbatical leave in Israel, Reinder worked intensively with modelling experts to develop a computer model for water transport in the soil-water-atmosphere system. He continued this work with colleagues at ICW and the later Staring Centre. Thanks to his leadership skills, Reinder had now risen to head of the ‘Water Management’ department and ‘Deputy Director of Research’.

In 1990, Reinder moved to the university as professor of ‘Soil Physics, Agrohydrology and Groundwater Management’. He envisioned the great value of closer cooperation between fundamental research at the university and applied research at the institutes. Reinder thrived in the international and innovative atmosphere of the university. He attracted visitors from all over the world, whom he welcomed hospitably and generously provided with documentation. In turn, he gave courses on all continents. His agrohydrological model was further developed with PhD students and is used worldwide under the name SWAP in environmental issues on efficient water use, drainage and salinisation. In November 2024, we celebrated the 50^th  anniversary of SWAP, which includes the famous Feddes function for root water extraction. Reinder held many advisory positions related to water outside the university: for instance at the Royal Academy of Sciences, at KNMI and at UNESCO (where he was at the cradle of the Institute for Water Education in Delft). Because of his crucial role in scientific discussions on climate and water and the formation of public opinion on this topic, he was awarded the prestigious distinction of ‘Officer in the Order of Orange Nassau’ in 2003. On the occasion of his retirement in 2004, an international water conference was organised in Wageningen.

Reinder very much enjoyed supervising his 50 Dutch and foreign PhD students. As a colleague and professor, he was a friendly man with a good sense of humour. He was interested in all the staff in his chair group and took good care of them. He was proud of his staff and family and did show this. He could be very direct, but always sincere, with good intentions, and never harsh or spurious. People liked listening to him, although he was not a smooth talker. It was precisely this somewhat wavering way of speaking that made clear he was thinking about what he was saying. He made a non-erasable impression on us.

Jos van Dam, Flip Witte, Mirjam Hack-ten Broeke, Ruud Bartholomeus and Coen Ritsema

Survey for Users of Modeling Platform and Decision Support Tool 

SOILPROM is an EU-funded project that will be improving models that predict the movement of pollutants through soil, air, water, and plants. Our outputs include an open-access Modelling Platform and a Decision Support Tool. The modelling platform (MP) will deliver the models in a single place, allowing users to run them in combination. The Decision Support Tool (DST) will be integrated into the platform to allow users with less advanced modelling skills to partly utilize the models in decision-making and policy making.

We are keen to seek your opinion, expectations, needs, and habits vis-a-vis soil data, modelling, and decision-making. Therefore, we request you to please use some of your valuable time to answer a few questions in this survey: link to the SOILPROM survay

ISMC Workshop @ Wageningen University 

On March 24-25, a mini ISMC Workshop will be organized in Wageningen. The objective of the workshop is to revisit ISMC activities since its foundation, introducing WG activities, exploring potential calls, and discussing the upcoming ISMC activities. The brief agenda points is listed below for reference:

• Revisit to ISMC activities since its foundation
• ISMC WG presentations
• CostAction call
• Upcoming ISMC activities
• Some research updates from ISMC members

You are all cordially invited to join this workshop, and click here for registration.

It is to note that this workshop is going to be organized hybrid, and only limited on-site participation can be accommodated. We will send out the online meeting link as soon as we fix the agenda.

Rien van Genuchten Conference at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro May 7-9 in Rio (Brazil)

Flow and transport research of unsaturated porous media has seen much progress recently. Unfortunately, much still needs to be done to improve predictions and decision-making in real life. The main objectives of the conference are to disseminate the latest research in modeling porous media at different scales (molecular, pore, laboratory, field, regional and global scales), to promote the exchange of research between various disciplines and regions of this world, to encourage joint research, and to build a network of contacts for young scientists.

The concept of porous media is used in several areas of science and engineering, such as geomechanics, soil and rock mechanics, geology, civil and petroleum engineering, bioremediation, the geosciences (hydrogeology, geophysics, biology), and materials science. Multiphase flow in porous media is an important topic and has stood out as a primordial field of research in these areas of research, including for devising new forms of energy (e.g., fuel cells and capturing carbon dioxide). Many natural systems such as soils, rocks, zeolites, biological tissues (bones, wood), as well as engineered materials such as cement, plastics, ceramics, paper, and pharmaceutical products, can be classified as porous media. More information can be found here.

Special Issue in SOIL on Advances in dynamic soil modelling across scales open for submission

This special issue (SI) invites papers that study soil dynamics using numerical and statistical models. The focus will be on the development of model-based representations, or digital twins, of soil systems to study soil processes, dynamics, and functions from the pore to the landscape scale and from diurnal dynamics to millennial evolution. By bringing together modellers and models that work on different spatiotemporal scales, we aim at synergies between soil hydrology, soil physics, soil geography, and soil ecology to develop holistic models that consider soils and their functions as dynamic systems. This SI is an initiative of the International Soil Modeling Consortium and the 3-4D Soil models working group, part of the German Soil Science Society. Further details on the SI and submission can be found here. Submission deadline is Summer 2025.

Call for Data Input: Soil Water Retention Curve (SWRC) Datasets for Pan-European Mapping

As part of the AI for Soil Health initiative, in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre, we aim to develop a pan-European map of the soil water retention curve (SWRC) using the physics-informed neural network (PINN) approach of Norouzi et al. (2024) (DOI: 10.22541/essoar.171926389.99753202/v1).

We seek SWRC datasets, including paired soil matric potential and volumetric water content values with sampling coordinates, to train and validate the PINN model for accurately representing soil hydraulic properties across Europe. Owing to the flexibility of the approach, datasets with limited measurements, such as a single measured point on the SWRC, are also highly useful and welcome. Because the approach works as well for the dry range beyond the wilting point (> pF = 4.2), we are also highly interested in data measured by WP4 dew-point potentiometer (or similar device).

If you have datasets or know of individuals or institutions who might have relevant data and are interested in contributing, please don’t hesitate to contact Sarem Norouzi (sarem.nrz@agro.au.dk), Lis Wollesen de Jonge (lis.w.de.jonge@agro.au.dk), or Peter Lehmann (peter.lehmann@env.ethz.ch).

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. 

Hydro-pedotransfer functions: a roadmap for future development

Hydro-pedotransfer functions (PTFs) relate easy-to-measure and readily available soil information to soil hydraulic properties (SHPs) for applications in a wide range of process-based and empirical models, thereby enabling the assessment of soil hydraulic effects on hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes. At least more than 4 decades of research have been invested to derive such relationships. However, while models, methods, data storage capacity, and computational efficiency have advanced, there are fundamental concerns related to the scope and adequacy of current PTFs, particularly when applied to parameterise models used at the field scale and beyond. Most of the PTF development process has focused on refining and advancing the regression methods, while fundamental aspects have remained largely unconsidered. Most soil systems are not represented in PTFs, which have been built mostly for agricultural soils in temperate climates. Thus, existing PTFs largely ignore how parent material, vegetation, land use, and climate affect processes that shape SHPs. The PTFs used to parameterise the Richards–Richardson equation are mostly limited to predicting parameters of the van Genuchten–Mualem soil hydraulic functions, despite sufficient evidence demonstrating their shortcomings. Another fundamental issue relates to the diverging scales of derivation and application, whereby PTFs are derived based on laboratory measurements while often being applied at the field to regional scales. Scaling, modulation, and constraining strategies exist to alleviate some of these shortcomings in the mismatch between scales. These aspects are addressed here in a joint effort by the members of the International Soil Modelling Consortium (ISMC) Pedotransfer Functions Working Group with the aim of systematising PTF research and providing a roadmap guiding both PTF development and use. We close with a 10-point catalogue for funders and researchers to guide review processes and research. More information can be found here.

Featured Soil Modeller (Jingyi Huang)

Multi-sensor model-data fusion for high-resolution soil moisture mapping

Dr. Jingyi Huang (jhuang426@wisc.edu) is an associate professor at the Department of Soil and Environmental Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He obtained an PhD degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia. His group currently works on soil sensing and monitoring, with a focus on soil water dynamics and its interactions with carbon and nitrogen cycles (https://soilsensingmonitoring.soils.wisc.edu/).

- Please tell us briefly about yourself and your research interest.
 
My research interests focus on developing model-data fusion for soil processes modeling and natural resources management (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZEkcUDUAAAAJ). On one hand, I develop proximal and in situ sensors to monitor soil properties such as soil moisture and nitrate concentrations (https://engineering.wisc.edu/news/printed-sensors-in-soil-could-help-farmers-improve-crop-yields-and-save-money/) to understand the changes in soil hydrophysical and biogeochemical processes under climate change and human activities. On the other hand, I integrate sensor data from multi-source platforms including remote sensing with data-driven and mechanistic models to model and map soil processes across scales.
 
-  How did you first become interested in soil modelling and learn about ISMC?
 
I did my graduate studies in Australia, where sensor data and geostatistical methods are combined to understand soil genesis and variations and its controlling factors. I learned about ISMC after I started an assistant professor position in the US and found that ISMC assembles a large number of researchers globally who develop soil process models to understand soil-plant-atmosphere interactions.
 
-Can you share with us your current research focus? And, please tell us briefly how your research could contribute to ISMC Science Panel’s activities
 
My current research focuses on better representing soil heterogeneity in soil modelling. Soil heterogeneity is a result of soil-forming factors that vary at different spatial and temporal scales. When high-resolution soil products/models are developed, it remains a challenge to properly represent the soil heterogeneity. To address this issue, we take two approaches: 1) leveraging data-driven machine learning methods to integrate multi-source and multi-modal sensor data for modelling soil processes (e.g., soil moisture dynamics) at high spatial and temporal resolutions, and 2) applying data-assimilation approaches to incorporate soil process knowledge to constrain the data-driven models and produce high-resolution (e.g., < 1 km, daily) soil models (e.g., water balance) at the continental to global scale that are computationally efficient and physically sound. My research is linked with the ISMC’s Data & Observation model linking panel.
 
-Please tell us how can ISMC help you advance in your career?
 
Soil process modelling plays an important role in Earth systems modelling and contributes to the understanding the feedback between terrestrial ecosystems to human-driven climate change. I hope to collaborate with ISMC researchers to develop new soil models and data products that advance our knowledge in soil science as well as promote the use of these new soil models/data products in the broader Earth system modelling communities.
 
- 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?
 
From my personal experience, I benefit a lot from open-sourced well-documented manuals/ algorithm theoretical basis documents of soil/earth systems models or remote sensing derived land surface products (e.g., soil moisture, evapotranspiration, gross primary production). These materials have helped me better understand the scientific basis for model development and parameterization. I also benefit a lot from open-access online courses on soil sensing and modelling. I really like the summer schools organized by the ISMC that help and support early career members and students with soil process modelling. I hope to work with interested ISMC community members to organize similar workshops in the US in the near future.