This paper traces how the self-understanding of soil science has changed in relation to ideas of societal relevance and academic legitimacy. While soil science was established as an academic discipline with strong links to agriculture, this link was largely lost around 1980. This led to a perceived crisis of the discipline, which has been followed by a long process of redefining its self-understanding. Building on document analysis and qualitative interviews, this paper traces five ways in which soil scientists have re-articulated the relevance of soil science, and analyses if and how these re-articulations are linked to new kinds of research practices and new self-understandings of soil science as a discipline. We conceptualise these re-articulations of relevance as different epistemic commitments that have provided soil scientists with a repertoire of relating their research to societal and environmental problems. At the same time, we also highlight how this epistemic diversity has created tensions in the discipline's self-understanding. Related to recent calls to further integrate different kinds of soil-related knowledge, we argue that these tensions still need to be turned into productive interaction to create synergy instead of competition between different ways of articulating relevance—allowing different kinds of soil-related research to thrive, both in their distinct regimes of relevance, and in a fruitful co-production. This paper shows that studies of how ways of articulating relevance change over time can provide new insights to debates about what conditions support science in gaining societal relevance. 

Changing articulations of relevance in soil science: Diversity and (potential) synergy of epistemic commitments in a scientific discipline.

Over the last few years, several researchers working on the development of “biogeochemical” or “ecosystem-scale” models of soil carbon dynamics have reported struggling with a number of difficult challenges. At the same time, work in this area has focused exclusively on microbial activity described at a macro-ecological level, and has entirely bypassed the abundant literature produced in the last two decades on the study of soil processes at the microscale. Juxtaposition of these different observations suggests that a radical shift of perspective is in order. In this general context, the present article carries out an in-depth analysis of several of the key limitations of current ecosystem-scale models and recommends a number of steps to shift the perspective to one that is argued to have a better chance of success in the relatively short time we have to address several pressing soil-related environmental problems. These steps, in particular, require the development of large-spatial-scale models of soil carbon dynamics to be far more interdisciplinary than it has been till now, and to adopt a “bottom-up” approach, building on what the research at the microscale reveals about soil processes. Nevertheless, because it may assist in upscaling efforts, it is argued that some room should be preserved for work to continue on the search for empirical models applicable at large spatial scales. 

Ecosystem-scale modelling of soil carbon dynamics: Time for a radical shift of perspective?

Ecosystem-Scale Modeling of Soil Carbon Dynamics: Time for a Radical Shift of Perspective?

We, the co‐authors of this letter, are an international group of soil scientists at early career stages, from PhD students to postdoctoral researchers, lecturers, and research fellows with permanent positions. Here, we present our collective musings on soil research challenges and opportunities and, in particular, the points raised by Philippe Baveye (Baveye, 2020a, 2020b) and Johan Bouma (Bouma, 2020) on bypass and hyperbole in soil science. Raising awareness about these issues is a first and necessary step. To this end, we would like to thank Philippe Baveye and Johan Bouma for initiating this debate........

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Charlotte Védère

Papers

Bypass and hyperbole in soil science: A perspective from the next generation of soil scientists