First SOCscape project meeting in Sion!

Despite the importance of mountain soils as hotspots of land cover and climatic changes and their crucial role in providing multiple ecosystem services, our ability to quantify and predict the spatial distribution of lateral carbon fluxes and stocks across these highly heterogeneous landscapes is still limited.

The SOCscape project aims to evaluate soil carbon stocks and lateral fluxes in complex alpine landscapes affected by soil erosion and gain a mechanistic understanding of the role of interactions between topography, climate, and geology in shaping carbon dynamics. To this end, we will combine novel high-resolution modeling with a rigorous monitoring campaign in two Alpine catchments.

The project is a collaboration between the Laboratory of Catchment Hydrology and Geomorphology (CHANGE) at EPFL and the Soil Resources Group at ETH Zurich, with partners from University of Lausanne (UNIL) and WSL. In this first full-day meeting we had the opportunity to exchange on several monitoring and modeling aspects, align on research questions and project goals, and plan for the field campaign ahead. The meeting was held at ALPOLE in Sion with the participation of several members of CHANGE lab, S. Doetterl and S. Braunschweigh from ETHZ, S. Lane (UNIL), M. Rowley (University of Zurich), and N. Peleg (UNIL).

Stay tuned for the next updates and the start of our fieldwork in Val d'Arolla and Vallon de Nant!