ISMC News 8 August 2024
Announcements + Featured Paper + Featured Soil Modeller
Webinar for the 2024 ISMC van Genuchten Award held by Paolo Nasta
17 of September 2024
“20 years in the Alento Hydrological Observatory”
The Alento Hydrological Observatory has amassed a rich dataset from diverse monitoring techniques and sampling campaigns. The goal is to gain hydrological understanding by effectively implementing this data set into hydrological models. The challenge is to describe the complex, non-linear hydrological processes modulated by scale-dependent feedback and multiscale spatio-temporal heterogeneity.
The webinar will be held 17th of September 2024 at 16:00 to 17:00 (GMT+2 or Berlin time). For access use this link.
The first eLTER Science Conference will take place 23-27 June 2025
https://elter-ri.eu/science-conference. We wish to exchange and engage in scientific dialogue about the Whole Systems Approach, which eLTER strives to strengthen. A vibrant mix of keynote lectures, oral and poster sessions, exhibitions, workshops and excursions shall cover the diverse facets of environmental research. The conference brings together peers across disciplines, incl. major environmental research networks and Research Infrastructures in Europe and globally.
The common research challenges and aims, as well as many joint activities, have encouraged closer collaboration between eLTER and ISMC already for a long time. Therefore, we would like to personally invite you and the whole ISMC community to participate in this event and collaborate in co-creating an engaging and inclusive agenda. We believe the eLTER Science Conference is a good opportunity to present the top results from ISMC to our community at large. As a first step, please find in the link our calls for sessions and workshops. We hope you could come up with some inspiring sessions to further enforce the collaboration!
Please, circulate this invitation to your related communities. Looking forward to inspiring exchanges at the eLTER Science Conference in June 2025!
Global Soils Conference 2024 Caring Soils Beyond Food Security - Climate Change Mitigation & Ecosystem Services
The Global Soil Conference 2024 entitled Caring Soils Beyond Food Security - Climate Change Mitigation & Ecosystem Services will be held from 19-22 November 2024 at NASC Complex, New Delhi.
The Global Soils Conference 2024 will be a significant and prestigious event to be organized by the Indian Society of Soil Science, New Delhi in collaboration with International Union of Soil Sciences and supports from many national and international organisations with a motivation to provide an excellent international platform with renowned keynote and plenary speakers from all over the world. The main objective of the conferences is ‘Caring soils beyond food security: Climate Change mitigation and Ecosystem Services”. This conference aims to
address various challenges, issues and concerns/ importance of soils and the latest technology developments in sustainable soil/resource management in the light of the global issues such as food security, soil health improvement, enhancing input use efficiency through new fertilizers, rapid soil assessment techniques, land degradation, environmental quality, biodiversity protection and climate change adaptation and mitigation. The event will enable to assemble a diverse array of stakeholders, including scientists, policymakers, industry leaders, farmers, and environmental advocates, to engage in a comprehensive dialogue about the importance of soils beyond traditional agricultural perspectives. By examining the latest scientific research, sharing innovative management practices, and exploring policy frameworks, the conference will illuminate how caring for soils can lead to far-reaching benefits for the planet. The discussions and collaborations fostered here are poised to catalyze a paradigm shift in how soils are perceived and managed globally, promoting an integrated approach that recognizes and leverages their multifunctional capabilities. More information can be found here
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.
Land Surfaces at the Tipping-Point for Water and Energy Balance Coupling
The surface water and energy balances can be coupled or uncoupled depending on whether the evaporation regime is water-limited or energy-limited. As the landscape loses soil moisture during drydowns, a transition between the regimes may occur, which signifies a nonlinear change in water-energy-carbon coupling. Regions that switch often between these two regimes, that is, are dominated by neither regime, are particularly vulnerable to climate variability and change. To robustly identify these tipping points, we identify drydown events based on global soil moisture data sets from remote sensing. The event identification does not rely on precipitation information and is robust with respect to measurement noise. Then, the soil moisture thresholds delineating the evaporation regime transitions are determined by Sequential Monte Carlo Sampling and a two-stage parametrization strategy. Based on the estimated soil moisture thresholds across the globe, we estimate observation-based water availability indices which quantify the nonlinear controls of soil moisture on evaporation. This framework is tested and applied globally using Soil Moisture Active Passive soil moisture retrievals. Combined with a new tippling-point metric that describes the frequency of evaporation regime transitions, we identify regions that switch often between different evaporation regimes at the global scale. Given unit shifts in soil moisture, these regions will experience the most change in how their surface water and energy are coupled.
More details can be found here https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR032472
Featured Soil Modeller (Gonzalo Martínez)
Soil modeling and monitoring for water reuse in agriculture
Gonzalo Martinez is a professor of applied physics at the University of Córdoba, Spain. He studied agricultural engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and got into near surface geophysics at IFAPA and at the University of Cordoba where he become a PhD. Later, he did his postdoc at the USDA-ARS in Beltsville (MD), EEUU.
- Please tell us briefly about yourself and your research interest.
I am an agronomist from a small town in La Mancha, Spain, a predominantly agricultural area, and I have been consistently concerned about point and non-point sources of agriculturally originated pollutants, such as olive mill wastes and crop residues. We are currently conducting research on the sustainable management of olive tree irrigation using saline water produced by the olive pickling industry. Our goal is to contribute to the sector's circular economy and provide a valuable resource for dryland farms, especially in areas like southern Spain, where water resource availability is decreasing and rising temperatures are putting additional stress on crops.
- How did you first become interested in soil modelling and learn about ISMC?
During my PhD studies, I worked primarily on soil sensing and sampling and realized that both fields could benefit enormously from models to design sampling, relate to the actual measurements we were collecting, and evaluate different scenarios. Therefore, I dedicated most of my efforts to soil modelling during my postdoc stay at the USDA-ARS. I was very fortunate to share an office and collaborate with excellent modelers working in Professor Yakov Pachepsky’s department. We worked on various aspects of soil modelling, such as the development of new models, calibration, validation, sensitivity analysis, and data assimilation. More excitingly, we explored different topics, such as the fate and transport of bacteria and radionuclides. During the early 2010s, I met various research groups working on soil modelling, including those from USDA-ARS, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Penn State University, and Polytechnic University of Madrid. These groups recognized the need to collaborate and share their knowledge to enhance the potential of soil models, which eventually led to the formation of the ISMC.
-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
Currently, we are working on the development of management tools and strategies to address the reuse of water for agricultural irrigation, specifically for the olive oil and pickling industries. Both sectors can contribute to developing a risk management plan under the new circular economy action plan presented in the EU Regulation 741/2020. These risk management plans are primarily based on soil modeling and monitoring. Therefore, the activities of the ISMC science panel can significantly contribute to achieving these objectives.
-Please tell us how can ISMC help you advance in your career?
The main objectives of ISMC align perfectly with my current research and future plans. Collaboration is fundamental in research, and ISMC provides an excellent platform to share information, seek assistance in cross-disciplinary sciences, and find partners for future research projects.
- 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?
Soil models are essentially simplified mathematical representations of the biosphere. Therefore, they require direct interaction with observation and data collection. I would also recommend that early career members of ISMC acquire a strong foundation in basic sciences, such as mathematics, statistics, physics, biology, and chemistry, or seek out knowledgeable colleagues to learn from. This background is crucial for developing, improving, and applying models for decision-making and analysis to address key local and global issues. Additionally, coding is of critical importance for working with models and all related processes, such as data analysis and assimilation, sensitivity analysis, and more. Finally, an open mind, collaborative skills, and a commitment to continuous improvement are always beneficial.