Integrative Environmental Modeling

A fundamental problem that agro-environmental sciences have to face today is the lack of interdisciplinary linkages between the various disciplines dealing with agriculture and environment and the physics of the “soil medium” organization, which is the object of study of the pedology. Currently, the soil medium is far from being considered as the organized physical medium providing the physical conditions for life or development of the numerous biotic and abiotic processes that are taking place in soils. This contribution describes an integrative approach for understanding and modeling the natural environment, in which the soil–plant– atmosphere system is the physical unit of description. We call for distinguishing two kinds of environmental modeling cycles: a local modeling cycle, which is physical and multi-scale according to the soil medium organization, and a global modeling cycle, out of scale of processes, which is necessarily monoscale and statistically based. We propose a way for implementing the physical modeling cycle, inside and at the basis of the global cycle, by using the new concept of Structural Representative Elementary Volume (SREV) for the local-scale description instead of the well-known Representative Elementary Volume (REV) that is valuable only for the global scale. This implementation is possible only with the development of a new discipline in soil science—hydrostructural pedology—that offers a unique theoretical framework for modeling the hydro-functioning of the soil–plant–atmosphere system using physically based equations that take into account the local multi-scale organization of soils and their hydrostructural properties.