Representing Real Soils for Real People - Balancing Scales.

One of the most fascinating prospects of forest soil science is the concept of scale: Spatial (from the organo-mineral complex to landscape-level dynamics), Temporal (from 6-year eucalyptus plantations to 1000-year-old boreal forests), and Application (from small research plots to operational plantations or large tracts of unmanaged forest).  While young professors often hear about how much harder it is to get tenure these days, how much more competitive grants are, how students are not as good as they used to be, I would argue that we have more than enough benefits to balance out these woes. Our tools and technology have grown ever more sophisticated to analyze forest soils on these various scales and our potential to communicate knowledge grows everyday. By balancing scales, we have the opportunity to build on the accomplishments of the past with new and powerful tools to discover and represent “real soils for real people.”  Focusing on “real soils” means moving beyond the singular intensively studied research site. While the pools and fluxes of a single site may be well understood, there is little confidence what it means for other sites. A future model might include more “hub and spoke” designs where we intensively study a “hub” but also include a variety of surrogate measures that can be applied across the landscape in “spokes” to evaluate how much sites might differ and how variable responses might be. The challenge in the years to come will be to integrate intensive research site analyses with large landscape scales. Additionally, as we have moved into the Anthropocene, and every corner of this planet is influenced by humans, we begin to take greater responsibility and ownership of how our actions affect “real soils” in both production and “natural” areas to mitigate unexpected consequences. Balancing the scales of how real soils affect “real people” means both interacting with and integrating people that influence and manage soils and those that are affected by it. As early career scientists, we get stretched in many directions and are unsure how our career with play out or where the next grant will come from. Building a strong program that remains pertinent and interesting requires balancing the scales to best represent real soils for real people that will continue to build the foundation for the next generation.