Modelling Relationships Between Soil, Water and Ecosystem Processes in Loess Plateau Critical Zone in China.

Human activity strongly affects the Earth’s near-surface critical zone (CZ) where processes crucial for the availability of life-sustaining resources occur. Achieving a balance between CZ processes and human activity is essential for the harmonious and sustainable development of society within its environment. There are complicated interactions between vegetation, landscape patterns, and soil and water processes at different spatio-temporal scales, and these interactions affect the structure and function of the ecosystem. In order to sustain agricultural production while mitigating adverse environmental impacts in the fragile Loess agroecological zone of China, we are jointly funded to study the coupled mechanisms between the soil and water processes and ecosystem services across different spatial scales by combining observation and modelling techniques. In this research we will use a cascade approach to build an improved model framework applied at these different spatial scales. Mechanistic soil-water-plant models will be applied to the slope scale, where their outputs are then used as inputs for models at watershed level. Spatial empirical/statistical models are then used at the regional level to finalise the up-scaling.