Monitoring and modeling the soil-plant system toward understanding soil health

Zeng, Y., Verhoef, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9498-6696, Vereecken, H., Ben-Dor, E., Veldkamp, T., Shaw, L., Van Der Ploeg, M., Wang, Y. and Su, Z. (2025) Monitoring and modeling the soil-plant system toward understanding soil health. Reviews of Geophysics, 63 (1). e2024RG000836. ISSN 8755-1209 doi: 10.1029/2024RG000836

Abstract/Summary

The soil health assessment has evolved from focusing primarily on agricultural productivity to an integrated evaluation of soil biota and biotic processes that impact soil properties. Consequently, soil health assessment has shifted from a predominantly physicochemical approach to incorporating ecological, biological and molecular microbiology indicators. This shift enables a comprehensive exploration of soil microbial community properties and their responses to environmental changes arising from climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Despite the increasing availability of soil health indicators (physical, chemical, and biological) and data, a holistic mechanistic linkage has not yet been fully established between indicators and soil functions across multiple spatiotemporal scales. This article reviews the state-of-the-art of soil health monitoring, focusing on understanding how soil-microbiome-plant processes contribute to feedback mechanisms and causes of changes in soil properties, as well as the impact these changes have on soil functions. Furthermore, we survey the opportunities afforded by the soil-plant digital twin approach, an integrative framework that amalgamates process-based models, Earth Observation data, data assimilation, and physics-informed machine learning, to achieve a nuanced comprehension of soil health. This review delineates the prospective trajectory for monitoring soil health by embracing a digital twin approach to systematically observe and model the soil-plant system. We further identify gaps and opportunities, and provide perspectives for future research for an enhanced understanding of the intricate interplay between soil properties, soil hydrological processes, soil-plant hydraulics, soil microbiome, and landscape genomics.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/120416
Identification Number/DOI	10.1029/2024RG000836
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Soil Research Centre
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
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