Untapped Opportunities: Soil Science and Hydrology.

Soil is central, both literally and functionally, in hydrologic systems and problems. Water is a vital and major component of soil. In hydrology, quantification of fluxes, reservoir levels, and contaminant concentrations are of paramount concern. Soil science produces much quantitative characterization, yet conveys some of its richest and most important information in the understanding of patterns, order, composition, and distribution of constituents.

Much is to be gained from incorporating the concepts, methods, and body of knowledge from the one field into the other. A prime example is the relation of texture and structure in the estimation of soil hydraulic properties. Fundamentally soil structure plays a far greater role in making hydraulic properties what they are, while soil texture is important mainly through its influence on soil structure. Yet hydrologic approaches overwhelmingly rely on texture, usually without any explicit role of pedologic structure. The main reason is that texture is readily quantifiable whereas structural information largely has the form of qualitative description and broad classes of quantitative measure. The development of connective relations between the qualitative (mainly soils) and quantitative (mainly hydrology) information is a little-explored territory with tremendous potential for advancing both hydrology and soil science. Similar openings for much-needed development pertain to the transport and activity of contaminants, nutrients, biological organisms, hydric features, colloids, and all sorts of soil developmental processes. Thus great opportunities arise when we treat the disciplines of soil science and hydrology as intertwined in practice as they are in their fundamentals.