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STAiR: Looking into Earths critical zone.

The soil critical zone constitutes Earth’s thin porous skin between the atmosphere and the groundwater. It is not a uniform skin; soil is an exceptionally complicated biogeochemical system at all scales from micron to landscape. Today soil resources are under increasing pressure due to global population growth and intensified agricultural and urban uses. While best known for its role in agricultural production of foods, soil is equally fundamental for waste disposals, ground water purity and recharge, and climate impact. The soil critical zone acts as a "geomembrane" across which water and solutes as well as energy, gases, solids and organisms actively exchange with the Earth's atmosphere to create a life-sustaining environment. The soil critical zone hence regulates water and chemical fluxes between the atmosphere and ground water aquifers and accordingly controls their quality.

A positive human control of the soil critical zone requires detailed knowledge and quantification of the interrelated physical, chemical and biological processes within the thematic areas illustrated on the front page. Without an interdisciplinary approach we cannot hope to identify soil management strategies sustaining quality and productivity of agricultural soil with minimized environmental impact, optimally predict and minimize gas emissions from soil to indoor air in buildings, design economically and remediation-effective systems for cleaning up contaminated soil sites, or realistically try to estimate regional, national, and global trace gas exchange between soil and atmosphere. Today, we are trying to do all of this based on a fragmented and empirical knowledge of soil, often resulting in erroneous predictions and expensive, ineffective solutions. Understanding and quantifying interactions between key soil processes at different scales is necessary to create a knowledge-based platform for directing processes within the Earth’s critical zone towards safeguarding soil quality, human health, and a habitable climate.

What is needed, is not only new research-based knowledge in this field, but also a large number of individuals trained to understand these complex interdependencies so that they can contribute to making educated decisions affecting the planets future. This is the basis and our motivation for the STAiR research education programme and our vision for the future of environmental soil science and engineering. The STAiR research-training programme will educate and train Ph.D. students in the interdisciplinary area of soil-founded research. The five interdisciplinary scientific themes that the STAiR PhD stipends will be grouped around are more specifically defined as: