Climate and land use change are key drivers influencing terrestrial environmental systems that need to be managed by society in the coming decades. These changes act on all compartments of terrestrial systems and provoke system reactions on different spatial and temporal scales. The development of management and adaptation strategies to cope with these changes defines the key research fields in soil science. The development of these strategies is, however, hampered by our limited ability to predict states and fluxes in terrestrial systems at scales relevant for management and this issue constitutes the main core of our research activities in the institute.
