Soil Systems As a Two-Way Street: Using Soil Morphology to Predict Waterflow through Landscapes and Reading Landscapes to Predict Soil Morphology.

Soil Systems are a catena – based framework for evaluating, understanding and communicating the interconnectedness of soils.  One aspect of this framework is the potential to: 1) Recognize the hydropedology of soils as expressed by soil morphology to infer dominant, internal water movement direction (up /down / lateral) and to extend those interpretation to the surrounding landscape.  2) Recognize the landscape and prevailing climate dynamics to infer the dominant water flow through the landscape and by extension, where to expect certain soil morphologies to occur.  These two scalar directions (large scale to smaller vs. small scale to larger) both have value and application to explain and to predict general water flow through landscapes.