The remarkable complexity of soil and its importance to a wide range of ecosystem services presents major challenges to the modeling of soil processes. Although major progress in soil models has occurred in the last decades, models of soil processes remain disjointed between disciplines or ecosystem services, with considerable uncertainty remaining in the quality of predictions and several challenges that remain yet to be addressed. First, there is a need to improve exchange of knowledge and experience among the different disciplines in soil science and to reach out to other Earth science communities. Second, the community needs to develop a new generation of soil models based on a systemic approach comprising relevant physical, chemical, and biological processes to address critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of soil processes and their interactions. Overcoming these challenges will facilitate exchanges between soil modeling and climate, plant, and social science modeling communities. It will allow us to contribute to preserve and improve our assessment of ecosystem services and advance our understanding of climate-change feedback mechanisms, among others, thereby facilitating and strengthening communication among scientific disciplines and society. We review the role of modeling soil processes in quantifying key soil processes that shape ecosystem services, with a focus on provisioning and regulating services. We then identify key challenges in modeling soil processes, including the systematic incorporation of heterogeneity and uncertainty, the integration of data and models, and strategies for effective integration of knowledge on physical, chemical, and biological soil processes. We discuss how the soil modeling community could best interface with modern modeling activities in other disciplines, such as climate, ecology, and plant research, and how to weave novel observation and measurement techniques into soil models. We propose the establishment of an international soil modeling consortium to coherently advance soil modeling activities and foster communication with other Earth science disciplines. Such a consortium should promote soil modeling platforms and data repository for model development, calibration and intercomparison essential for addressing contemporary challenges.

Although desert soils cover approximately one third of the Earth's land surface, surprisingly little is known about their physical properties and how those properties affect the ecology and hydrology of arid environments. The main goal of this study was to advance our understanding of desert soil hydrodynamics. For this purpose, we developed a process-based component within HYDRUS-1D to describe the moisture dynamics of an arid zone soil as a function of water fluxes through the soil surface. A modified van Genuchten model for the dry end of the soil water retention curve was developed to better capture the basic flow processes for very dry conditions. A scaling method was further used to account for variabilities in water retention because of changes in the bulk density vs. depth. The model was calibrated and validated using hourly soil moisture, temperature, and mass data from a 3-m-deep weighing lysimeter of the Scaling Environmental Processes in Heterogeneous Arid Soils facility at the Desert Research Institute (Las Vegas, NV). Measurements and simulations during a 1-yr period agreed better under precipitation (wetting) than under evaporation (drying) conditions. Evaporation was better simulated for wet than for dry soil surface conditions. This was probably caused by vapor-phase exchange processes with the atmosphere, which were unaccounted for and need to be further explored. Overall, the model provides a promising first step toward developing a more realistic numerical tool to quantify the moisture dynamics of arid ecosystems and their role in climate change, plant growth, erosion, and recharge patterns.

Soil compaction represents one of the most ubiquitous environmental impacts of human development, decreasing bulk-scale soil porosity and hydraulic conductivity, thereby reducing soil productivity and fertility. At the aggregate-scale however, this study shows that natural root-induced compaction increases contact areas between aggregates, leading to an increase in unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of the soils adjacent to the roots. Contrary to intuition, water flow may therefore be locally enhanced due to root-induced compaction. This study investigates these processes by using recent advances in X-ray microtomography (XMT) imaging and numerical water flow modeling to show evolution in interaggregate contact and its implications for water flow between aggregates under partially saturated conditions. Numerical modeling showed that the effective hydraulic conductivity of a pair of aggregates undergoing uniaxial deformation increased following a nonlinear relationship as the interaggregate contact area increased due to increasing aggregate deformation. Numerical modeling using actual XMT images of aggregated soil around a root surrogate demonstrated how root-induced deformation increases unsaturated water flow toward the root, providing insight into the growth, function, and water uptake patterns of roots in natural soils.

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