European Geosciences Union
Division on Soil System Sciences
President: Claudio Zaccone (sss@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Bas van Wesemael
(bas.vanwesemael@uclouvain.be)
Soil is the interface between the crust and atmosphere, and is the basis of life on earth. The impact of Soil Science to the society has probably never been as high as it is currently. The importance of soils in the Earth System must make us, the soil scientists, more noticeable at the EGU.
The aim of the SSS is to coordinate the EGU scientific programme on Soil Science and related activities. The SSS contributes actively with EGU by promoting scientific interchange and dissemination of activity carried out by members.
CiteScore 2019 values are now available in Scopus. SOIL, our EGU Soil System Sciences (SSS) division open-access journal ranked 3/126 (98th percentile) in the category Soil Science !!!
The deadline to nominate the best deserving soil researchers for the Philippe Duchaufour Medal and the Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award for 2021 has been extended to 30 June 2020.
Detailed information on the selection process and how to propose a candidate is available on the Awards & Medals section of the EGU website. Nominations for all the medals and awards must be submitted via an online nomination form. Before submitting a nomination, please carefully check if the nomination and supporting documents satisfy the EGU requirements.
As every two years, our Division was looking for enthusiastic soil science community members to join our team as Subdivision Committee members. This year, several Subdivision chairs and committee members are ending their mandate, and new candidates will be proposed and approved during the SSS Division Meeting on May 5th.
The EGU has issued an open letter to funding agencies and evaluation committees with information on the assessment of presentations given at its scientific meetings.
The letter details the three presentation types given at EGU General Assembly and states that the selection of the type of presentation is not based on any evaluation of the scientific value of the contribution. This letter emphasises that there is no distinction regarding the standing, quality or prestige of oral, poster, or PICO presentations.
Lily Pereg, Deputy President and Programme Group Chair of the EGU Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division and Executive Editor of the SOIL journal, died tragically and unexpectedly earlier this month during a trip to Argentina.
Pereg was a microbiologist with 25 years of research experience and an associate professor at the School of Science and Technology, University of New England in Armidale, Australia. An EGU member since 2013, Pereg was elected to serve as president of the EGU SSS Division in Autumn 2017, a role she was due to take on in April this year.
Amazing soil pictures? Are you a photoartist? Share your work at Imaggeo, the open-access image repository of EGU.
Lorena M. Zavala (Univ. of Sevilla) holds a soil
aggregate composed of organic matter from a
peatland from the Wicklow Mountains (Ireland)
The 2020 Philippe Duchaufour Medal is awarded to Georg Guggenberger for outstanding research in the field of soil science, with special emphasis on conceptual work on the soil organic carbon evolution and interaction of organic matter with mineral structures.
The 2020 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Sebastian Dötterl for his contributions to the understanding of biogeochemical processes along geoclimatic gradients and the role of soil development and soil disturbance as controls on carbon dynamics.
The 2019 Philippe Duchaufour Medal is awarded to Claire Chenu for outstanding research in the field of soil science, with special emphasis on pioneering conceptual work on the microbial-mineral interactions and organic matter dynamics in soil.
The 2019 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Bahar S. Razavi for outstanding contributions to the understanding of biogeochemical processes in terrestrial ecosystems, in particular the effects of abiotic factors on soil organic matter and nutrient cycling.
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Arjun Chakrawal How does soil spatial heterogeneity affect decomposition kinetics?
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Bruna Imai The role of Common Mycorrhizal Networks for nutrient allocation in Fagus sylvatica (European beech) trees
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Ringo Schwabe The effect of the application of cell cultures and supernatants of PGPR (Arthrobacter oxydans) as soil additives on the phytoextraction of germanium and rare earth elements
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Roisin O'Riordan The Soil-City Interface: Soil organic matter and ecosystem services
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Theodor Bughici Field Crop Irrigation–Multi-Objective Optimization and Sensitivity to Weather Forecast Accuracy
Inspired by the recent #Black in Geoscience blog post on the EGU Geodynamics Division blog, we decided to highlight Black soil scientists in a separate blog post! As we already mentioned on Twitter, our Soil System Sciences Division Outreach team is busy thinking about what we can do about the lack of diversity, esp. for Black soil scientists in our scientific community. Specifically, how can we increase the representation of Black people in soil science (Fig. 2), and foster stronger …
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It is my great pleasure to introduce you to our new SSS Early Career Scientist (ECS) & Outreach team. This year, apart from having a new ECS Representative – Layla San Emeterio – we realized that there’s just too much fun for one person! That’s why this year, our division has also elected two ECS Co-representatives: Mika Turunen and Dan Evans. Mika and Dan started immediately helping Layla and I with Twitter and brainstorming about blog content. And that’s not …
Firstly, we hope that all of you, as well as your relatives, are staying healthy and safe at home. COVID-19 has spread around the planet, sending billions of people into lockdown. We are sure that we can overcome this crisis by supporting each other and making our best with our individual actions. As you have probably noticed, the physical EGU General Assembly 2020 has been officially cancelled. During the last month, many questions about the EGU’s perspective and actions have …
Thursday 30 July marks the centennial of the birth of Marie Tharp, a pioneering geologist and cartographer whose groundbreaking scientific contributions played a key role in the eventual acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. Tharp is best known for her detailed seafloor maps that revealed a wealth of previously unknown features, including seamounts, trenches, transform faults, and most notably, the mid-ocean ridge system.
Tharp’s story is all the more compelling due to the adversity she overcame during her career—much of it related to her gender. Because Tharp didn’t always receive credit for her work, her contributions were initially overlooked. Fortunately, Hali Felt, the author of Tharp’s biography, and others have helped correct the record. “Marie wouldn’t have chosen to experience the gender discrimination that told her the humanities were a “better fit” and forced her to work in an office rather than the field,” says Felt in a recent EGU blog, “but the result was that she found her calling closer to home, and mapped 70 percent of the Earth’s surface in the process.”
This month, EGU is celebrating Tharp’s achievements, and those of all women geoscientists, through a series of posts, including one by the Tectonics and Structural Geology Division that revisits her legacy and its importance for laying the foundations of modern geology. EGU also spoke with six researchers working in the fields of ocean science, tectonics, and mapping to ask them what Marie Tharp’s work means to them personally, as well as to the future of ocean science and tectonic research. “Her life story is a burning, guiding light for me,” says marine geographer Dawn Wright.
We hope these articles will inspire all EGU members to help one another overcome whatever adversity we face. Tharp “succeeded in building a career that she loved, and was proud of,” says structural geologist Lucia Perez Diaz. “As a woman in science, I can’t imagine a better dream to work towards.”