Tracking Soil Health: Monitoring and Modeling the Soil-Plant System

The assessment of soil health has evolved from focusing primary on agricultural productivity to an integrated evaluation of soil biota and biotic processes that impact soil properties. Consequently, soil health assessment has shifted from a predominantly physico-chemical approach to incorporating ecological, biological and molecular microbiology methods. These methods enable a comprehensive exploration of soil microbial community properties and their responses to environmental changes arising from climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. Despite the increasing availability of soil health indicators (physical, chemical, and biological), a holistic mechanistic linkage between indicators and soil functions across multiple spatiotemporal scales has not yet been fully established. This article reviews the state-of-the-art of soil health monitoring, focusing on understanding how soil-microbiome-plant processes contribute to feedback mechanisms and causes of changes in soil properties, as well as the impact these changes have on soil functions. Furthermore, we survey the opportunities afforded by the soil-plant digital twin approach, an integrative framework that amalgamates process-based models, Earth Observation data, data assimilation, and physics-informed machine learning, to achieve a nuanced comprehension of soil health. This review delineates the prospective trajectory for monitoring soil health by embracing a digital twin approach to systematically observe and model the soil-plant system. We further identify gaps and opportunities, and provide perspectives for future research for an enhanced understanding of the intricate interplay between soil properties, soil hydrological processes, soil-plant hydraulics, soil microbiomes, and landscape genomics.