Hydropedology and the Societal Challenge of Realizing the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a major challenge for both society and the science community. Hydropedology, combining the expertise of soil physicists and pedologists, plays a key role in realizing goals focused on food, water, climate, and ecology, requiring interdisciplinary research. This update explores emerging trends and future work, focusing on examples of contributions by pedology to measuring and modeling in hydropedological studies. Many soil types create heterogeneous flow patterns that are difficult to characterize using current soil databases and physical flow models. The clear potential of hydropedology to produce better modeling results than those obtained from separate contributions by the two subdisciplines can, however, only be established by field validation of modeling results using different types of data and models. Overall soil input in interdisciplinary SDG-oriented research includes chemical and biological aspects that become more representative by considering hydropedological conditions.