Abstract:
This article presents a new paradigm in characterizing and modeling the multi-scale organized soil medium and the physical properties resulting from this organization which takes into account the hierarchical organization of the structured soil medium. The pedostructure is defined as the core of the soil medium and is the basis of the new paradigm including variables, equations, parameters, and units in soil physics. The paradigm allows for a thermodynamic characterization of the structured soil medium with respect to soil water content then bridging the gap between Pedology and Soil Physics. This approach leads to a new dimension in soil-water properties characterization that ensures a physically based modeling of processes in soil and the transfer of information from the physical scale of processes (pedostructure or laboratory measurements scale) to the application scale of the other disciplines (modeling and mapping scale).
