When: Tuesday 31 August,  14:00 - 15:20
Where:  Room D

In this special session, part of the 27th European Meeting of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics, we will cover different aspects of plant-soil interactions and linkage with geophysical methods.

In a context of global change and of land-use change, the the scientific community (e.g., ecologists, microbiologists, soil sciences, biophysics of plants) needs tools and capabilities to gain detailed insights into below-ground properties and processes, such as water and nutrient dynamics and their impacts on productivity and functioning of the ecosystems. Traditionally, this information is collected through destructive sampling, which can be costly, time-consuming, and not spatiotemporally dense enough to cover the heterogeneity or dynamics at meaningful scales. Geophysical imaging provides an alternative or complement to traditional methods to gather subsurface variables across time and space. This special session aims to provide an overarching understanding of the key aspects of soil-plant interactions and examples of how geophysics can be used to improve our understandings of such critical processes.

The session is organized around 4 keynote speakers:

The objectives of the special session are:

(i) Provide an update on current applications of geophysical methods for soil/plant interactions;

(ii) Provide a baseline understanding of key components of the plant-soil interactions;

(iii) Discussion about current and future geophysical capabilities and gaps in terms of applications to improve our understanding of plant-soil interactions.