Open AccessHydropedology and the Societal Challenge of Realizing the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Author(s) -
Bouma J.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
vadose zone journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.036
H-Index - 81
ISSN - 1539-1663
DOI - 10.2136/vzj2016.09.0080
Subject(s) - sustainable development , field (mathematics) , pedology , computer science , management science , environmental resource management , data science , environmental science , ecology , soil science , engineering , soil water , mathematics , biology , pure mathematics
Core Ideas The UN Sustainable Development Goals present a guiding principle for hydropedology. Hydropedology is potentially more effective than the separate disciplines. Pedologists should better support their observations with physical measurements. Measuring and interpreting bypass flow may be more effective than developing new theory. Existing soil databases can't provide a full picture of soil behavior in the field. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a major challenge for both society and the science community. Hydropedology, combining the expertise of soil physicists and pedologists, plays a key role in realizing goals focused on food, water, climate, and ecology, requiring interdisciplinary research. This update explores emerging trends and future work, focusing on examples of contributions by pedology to measuring and modeling in hydropedological studies. Many soil types create heterogeneous flow patterns that are difficult to characterize using current soil databases and physical flow models. The clear potential of hydropedology to produce better modeling results than those obtained from separate contributions by the two subdisciplines can, however, only be established by field validation of modeling results using different types of data and models. Overall soil input in interdisciplinary SDG‐oriented research includes chemical and biological aspects that become more representative by considering hydropedological conditions.