Evolutionary pathways in soil-landscape evolution models

Abstract

Soils and landscapes can show complex, nonlinear evolution, especially under changing climate or land use. Soil-landscape evolution models (SLEMs) are increasingly equipped to simulate the development of soils and landscapes over long timescales under these changing drivers, but provide large data output that can be difficult to interpret and communicate. New tools are required to analyze and visualize large model outputs. In this work, I show how spatial and temporal trends in previously published model results can be analyzed and visualized with evolutionary pathways, which are possible trajectories of the development of soils. Simulated differences in rainfall and land use control progressive or regressive soil development and convergence or divergence of the soil pattern. These changes are illustrated with real-world examples of soil development and soil complexity. The use of evolutionary pathways for analyzing the results of SLEMs is not limited to the examples in this paper, but they can be used on a wide variety of soil properties, soil pattern statistics and models. With that, evolutionary pathways provide a promising tool to analyze and visualize soil model output, not only for studying past changes in soils, but also for evaluating future spatial and temporal effects of soil management practices in the context of sustainability.