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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Environmental Microbial & Food Safety Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #295226
Title: Scaling in soils and other complex porous media

Author
item GUADGNINI, ALBERTO - Polytechnic University Of Marche
item SAN JOSE MARTINEZ, FERNANDO - Polytechnic University - Spain
item Pachepsky, Yakov

Submitted to: Vadose Zone Journal
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/1/2013
Publication Date: 8/15/2013
Citation: Guadgnini, A., San Jose Martinez, F., Pachepsky, Y.A. 2013. Scaling in soils and other complex porous media. Vadose Zone Journal. 12:3.

Interpretive Summary: Soils can be observed and studied over a wide range of scales, from micrometer size samples to landscapes or watersheds encompassing hundreds of square miles. Important decisions about land management are typically dependent on data collected at all of these scales. The process of integrating and synthesizing this information is referred to as scaling. Evaluating the efficiency and efficacy of management practices is dependent on accurate scaling techniques. This review article, published in a special issue of the Vadose Zone Journal elucidates current trends in scaling studies. The article is a summary of selected papers presented at the International conference PEDOFRACT 2012, organized by the Polytechnic university of Madrid with USDA-ARS participation. This article will be useful to a wide range of environmental professionals who are tasked with quantifying, analyzing, and managing the complexity of natural systems

Technical Abstract: Scaling remains one of the most challenging topics in earth and environmental sciences, forming a basis for our understanding of process development across the multiple scales which make up the subsurface environment. Understanding and succinct representation of scaling properties can lead to the unveiling of underlying relationships between system structure and response functions, improve parameterization of natural variability and heterogeneity, and help address societal needs by effectively merging existing knowledge acquired at different scales. The international workshop PEDOFRACT 2012 was held on 3-6 July 2012 in La Coruña, Spain, and attracted approximately 35 participants from 11 different countries. The objective of this work is to review the contributions from this workshop to the special issue of the Vadose Zone Journal in the context of modern trends in science of scaling in natural and constructed porous media. The special issue content the scale range from ultimate coarse regional and global scale studies of soil cover rather than individuals soils to the scales finer than that associated with geological or soil horizons that have become a notable source of data in critical zone media with the advent of modern computer tomography. The special issue illustrates the remarkable role and place of scaling in Earth sciences. Scaling plays a key role in processing and extracting information from these types of data which are difficult to handle with traditional data analysis methods. Earth (geophysical and environmental) variables and processes display scaling across a multiplicity of observation domains. This impacts our ability to provide predictions of key processes on the basis of limited observations collected on different (measurement) scales (volumes) within observation domains (windows) of variable sizes. It also affects model structure/development and therefore our ability to discriminate between different models. Most of the work in this volume show that fractal and multifractal theories allow synthetic characterization of scaling of key statistics through limited set of parameters which is typically compatible with the paucity of available information. Scaling in an important component of the pathway from the data we have to the data we need. Societally important decisions have to be made at coarser scales, and yet the feasible data collection occurs at finer scales. Mechanisms responsible for the efficiency of management practices are revealed at finer scales, and yet the efficiency of those practices is evaluated at coarser scales. Readers of this special issue will be delving into representative examples of the status and evolution of data-driven research into scaling in complex natural systems.