Modeling the influence of soil-plant residue contact on carbon mineralization: Comparison of a compartmental approach and a 3D spatial approach

Properties and Degradability of Hydrothermal Carbonization Products

“…A higher surface area generally promotes the availability of residue‐C to decomposing microorganisms (Angers and Recous, 1997). However, because the hydrochars in this study and the bark‐hydrochar in the study by Qayyum et al (2012) had comparable SSA values but different C mineralization rates, this causal relationship might be perturbed by other factors, such as particle size and morphology as well as the structure of the decomposer community (Garnier et al, 2008). …”

Three-dimensional distribution of water and air in soil pores: Comparison of two-phase two-relaxation-times lattice-Boltzmann and morphological model outputs with synchrotron X-ray computed tomography data

“…Among them, lattice-Boltzmann models (LBM) [29,20] are able to describe water, solute, and particulate transport in the interstitial space of soils, as well as the shape of air-water interfaces [13,53], without having to invoke the kind of simplifying assumptions about the geometry or topology of soil pores that were typical of earlier generations of models, based on traditional partial differential equations or capillary network idealizations. Similarly, agent-or individual-based models describe quantitatively the growth and metabolism of microorganisms much more realistically than traditional models, based on descriptions of population dynamics, and are able to account in great detail for the effects of the relative spatial distributions of fungi [13], bacteria [27,30,18,15], and the organic matter on which they feed. At the moment, the development of each of these different models is moving forward, in parallel with interdisciplinary efforts to combine them in order to describe various types of micro-scale scenarios and assess the nature of emergent properties of soil systems [13].…”

Grand challenges in the research on soil processes

“…Significant advances related to biological markers now allow specific bacteria to be identified in soils and their spatial distribution at micrometric scales to be determined in thin sections (Eickhorst and Tippkötter, 2008a,b), and this information can be translated into 3-dimensional distributions using recently developed statistical algorithms (Hapca et al, 2011). In addition, very efficient modeling tools, like the Lattice-Boltzmann model, allow the description of transport and physico-chemical processes occurring in soil pores at scales directly relevant to microorganisms (e.g., Vogel et al, 2005;Falconer et al, 2012;Genty and Pot, 2013), whereas individual-based models, also developing rapidly (Gras et al, 2010), can describe the dynamics of small groups of microorganisms inhabiting the pore space (e.g., Garnier et al, 2008).…”