Scientific Challenge and Innovation
The poetic novel
"The Man Who Planted Trees" (Giono, 1953) depicts the transformation of a barren wasteland into an ecosystem with a complex hydrological cycle through decades of tree planting. While inspirational, the story raises unresolved hydrological questions about feedbacks between soil, vegetation, climate, hydrology, and ecosystems, questions current models cannot fully address. Current Earth System Models fail to capture critical feedbacks between soil evolution, plant hydraulics, and atmospheric processes required for understanding coupled hydrological and ecosystem functioning (e.g., Miralles et al., 2025) because Earth's system compartments are often treated as silos or parameterized in crucial aspects of their dynamics. This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Can the compelling ecosystem transformation depicted in Giono's story be quantitatively validated through dynamic modeling?
References
Giono, Jean. 1953. "L'homme qui plantait des arbres." Vogue, Paris.Giono, Jean. 2015. The Man Who Planted Trees. New York, NY: Random House.Miralles, Diego G., Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano, Tim R. McVicar, and Miguel D. Mahecha. 2025. "Vegetation-Climate Feedbacks across Scales." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1544(1): 27-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15286. From Parameterized to Dynamic Earth System Coupling
Current ESS Models fail to capture critical feedbacks between soil evolution, plant hydraulics, and atmospheric processes required for understanding coupled hydrological and ecosystem functioning (e.g., Miralles et al., 2025) because Earth's system compartments are often treated as silos or heavily parameterized in crucial aspects of their dynamics. This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Can the compelling ecosystem transformation depicted in Giono's (1953) "The Man Who Planted Trees" be quantitatively validated through dynamic modeling? STRADIVARI aims to fill this knowledge gap by developing an integrated modeling framework that couples dynamic soil-biota interactions, plant hydraulic strategies, and atmospheric boundary layer processes, replacing the fixed BCs that constrain current models with dynamical feedbacks.
The GEOSPACE framework (D'Amato et al., 2025) demonstrates this integration philosophy through operational coupling of soil heat-water transport (WHETGEO) with transpiration processes (Prospero). In that approach, the dynamic root water uptake responds to evolving soil moisture while simultaneously influencing soil energy balance. This proof-of-concept validates that meaningful process coupling emerges from component interactions without sacrificing individual model integrity and represents a blueprint for the project.
The Figure illustrates the complexity of coupled Earth system interactions using Extended Petri Net notation (Bancheri et al., 2019). Even this simplified representation, which misses the feedback with the atmosphere, reveals multiple interdependencies across water, energy, and carbon budgets. The loops represent dynamic feedback, while solid arrows show water, carbon and energy fluxes that must be tracked simultaneously. Traditional models typically fix the quantity inside a triangle as boundary conditions rather than allowing them to evolve dynamically. For a full explanation of the symbols, please see the cited paper.
STRADIVARI aims to fill this knowledge gap by developing an integrated modeling framework that couples dynamic soil-biota interactions, plant hydraulic strategies, and atmospheric boundary layer processes, replacing the fixed boundary conditions that constrain current models with dynamical feedbacks.
Core Innovation: STRADIVARI represents a fundamental methodological paradigm shift: moving from model-constrained science to science-driven modeling. Traditional Earth System modeling forces researchers to adapt scientific questions to existing tool capabilities, while STRADIVARI inverts this relationship by providing computational infrastructure that adapts to scientific inquiry by design. Rather than solving all Earth System coupling challenges directly, STRADIVARI creates tools facilitating the investigation of process interactions, answering the question "what tools do we need to investigate this process?" This paradigm shift transforms Earth system modeling from isolated research efforts into collaborative knowledge construction. Individual researchers are enabled to contribute specialized process knowledge while the modeling infrastructure integrates these contributions into system-level understanding, creating a positive feedback loop where broader participation accelerates discovery across interconnected Earth system processes.
Community Innovation: The GEOframe system technologies, which form the backbone of the project and were designed in anticipation of the FAIR principles of reproducible research and community building, will be extended with AI agents. A domain-specific small language model trained on hydrological literature and extensive GEOframe documentation addresses the fundamental bottleneck by providing accessible interfaces to sophisticated modeling capabilities. This AI assistant will democratize access to complex Earth system modeling by enabling researchers without extensive technical expertise to interact naturally with the modeling framework through conversational interfaces, accelerating scientific discovery and broadening the user community.
References
- Bancheri, Marialaura, Francesco Serafin, and Riccardo Rigon. 2019. "The Representation of Hydrological Dynamical Systems Using Extended Petri Nets (EPN)." Water Resources Research 55(11): 8895-8921. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019wr025099.
- Giono, Jean. 1953. "L'homme qui plantait des arbres." Vogue, Paris.
- Giono, Jean. 2015. The Man Who Planted Trees. New York, NY: Random House.
- Miralles, Diego G., Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano, Tim R. McVicar, and Miguel D. Mahecha. 2025. "Vegetation-Climate Feedbacks across Scales." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1544(1): 27-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15286.
Objectives
STRADIVARI leverages established physical foundations, infiltration influenced by soil characteristics evolving through biotic activity (Brinkmann et al., 2010; Meng X et al., 2002), plant hydraulics with detailed transpiration processes (Kennedy et al., 2019; D'Amato and Rigon, 2025), soil and surface evaporation with proper energy partitioning (Or et al., 2013), and atmospheric boundary layer dynamics creating feedback loops with surface processes (Anderson et al., 2003; Siqueira et al., 2008), as launching points for investigating emergent behaviors from coupled system interactions. The modular component architecture, interconnected through supporting software layers (David et al., 2013; Moore and Hughes, 2017), enables exploration of cross-compartmental feedback loops that amplify or dampen climate responses through nonlinear dynamics. While such dynamics are well-documented at regional scales (Gross et al., 2018; Gröger et al., 2021), their investigation at catchment and local scales remains limited. The project's scope, while ambitious in vision, does not pretend to solve all coupling challenges directly but opens pathways toward their resolution. STRADIVARI will concentrate mainly on soil-plant interactions, water and carbon cycle dynamics, and plant-atmosphere exchanges. For atmospheric boundary layer description, the project will develop a hierarchy of models with increasing realism to bridge current modeling capabilities. By dynamically linking hydrology with soil biotic evolution (Meurer et al., 2020) and vegetation dynamics, STRADIVARI transcends traditional approaches through inter-compartmental feedback analyses.
Building on earlier visions (Rigon et al., 2006; Rigon et al., 2022), STRADIVARI couples water and energy budgets with dynamic soil and vegetation processes and atmospheric boundary layer transport equations. This addresses a critical gap: micrometeorological models often lack detailed soil and plant descriptions, while hydrological models miss key atmospheric interactions. Existing efforts suffer from architectural limitations and inflexible frameworks (Telteu et al., 2021). STRADIVARI's component-based architecture overcomes these constraints by enabling seamless process integration while maintaining computational efficiency and addressing theoretical and computational challenges in SPAC modeling, particularly regarding soil-plant, plant-atmosphere, and water-carbon cycle couplings. STRADIVARI adopts a "luthier" approach to ESS modeling, crafting instruments that enable virtuoso scientific performance rather than attempting to resolve all coupling challenges directly. Like a violin maker who provides musicians with tools for artistic expression, STRADIVARI provides researchers with computational infrastructure that embodies new conceptual frameworks for investigating process interactions. This philosophy recognizes that ESS coupling involves phenomena across multiple disciplines, temporal scales, and spatial domains that no single project can fully resolve. Instead, STRADIVARI creates a modular research infrastructure that enables systematic investigation of individual coupling mechanisms, virtual experiments to test competing hypotheses, community collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and progressive advancement as understanding develops. The project's success lies not in solving ESS coupling but in democratizing access to tools that enable meaningful investigation of these challenges. To accelerate adoption, STRADIVARI integrates Small Language Models with AI agents that provide intelligent assistance to new users and developers, making the modeling framework more accessible and reducing the learning curve for complex Earth system investigations.
References
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Anderson, M. C., et al. 2003. "A thermal-based remote sensing technique for routine mapping of land-surface carbon, water and energy fluxes from field to regional scales." Remote Sensing of Environment 90(4): 521-531.
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Brinkmann, Pernilla E., Wim H. Van der Putten, Evert-Jan Bakker, and Koen J. F. Verhoeven. 2010. "Plant-Soil Feedback: Experimental Approaches, Statistical Analyses and Ecological Interpretations." The Journal of Ecology 98(5): 1063-73.
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D'Amato, Concetta, and Riccardo Rigon. 2025. "Elementary Mathematics Helps to Shed Light on the Transpiration Budget under Water Stress." Ecohydrology: Ecosystems, Land and Water Process Interactions, Ecohydrogeomorphology 18(2).
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David, O., J. C. Ascough II, W. Lloyd, T. R. Green, K. W. Rojas, G. H. Leavesley, and L. R. Ahuja. 2013. "A Software Engineering Perspective on Environmental Modeling Framework Design: The Object Modeling System." Environmental Modelling & Software: With Environment Data News 39(c): 201-13.
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Gross, Markus, Hui Wan, Philip J. Rasch, Peter M. Caldwell, David L. Williamson, Daniel Klocke, Christiane Jablonowski, et al. 2018. "Physics–Dynamics Coupling in Weather, Climate, and Earth System Models: Challenges and Recent Progress." Monthly Weather Review 146(11): 3505-44.
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Gröger, Matthias, Christian Dieterich, Jari Haapala, Ha Thi Minh Ho-Hagemann, Stefan Hagemann, Jaromir Jakacki, Wilhelm May, et al. 2021. "Coupled Regional Earth System Modeling in the Baltic Sea Region." Earth System Dynamics 12(3): 939-73.
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Kennedy, D., Swenson, S., Oleson, K. W., Lawrence, D. M., Fisher, R., Lola da Costa, A. C., and Gentine, P. 2019. "Implementing plant hydraulics in the community land model, version 5." Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 11: 485-513.
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Meng, Xia, Annemieke M. Kooijman, Arnaud J. A. M. Temme, and Erik L. H. Cammeraat. 2022. "The Current and Future Role of Biota in Soil-Landscape Evolution Models." Earth-Science Reviews 226: 103945.
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Meurer, Katharina, Jennie Barron, Claire Chenu, Elsa Coucheney, Matthew Fielding, Paul Hallett, Anke M. Herrmann, et al. 2020. "A Framework for Modelling Soil Structure Dynamics Induced by Biological Activity." Global Change Biology 26(10): 5382-5403.
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Moore, R. V., and A. G. Hughes. 2017. "Integrated Environmental Modelling: Achieving the Vision." Geological Society, London, Special Publications 408(1): 17-34.
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Or, D., P. Lehmann, E. Shahraeeni, and N. Shokri. 2013. "Advances in Soil Evaporation Physics, A Review." Vadose Zone Journal 12.
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Rigon, R., G. Bertoldi, and T. Over. 2006. "GEOtop: A Distributed Hydrological Model with Coupled Water and Energy Budgets." Journal of Hydrometeorology 7: 371-88.
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Rigon, R., G. Formetta, Marialaura Bancheri, Niccolò Tubini, Claudia d'Amato, O. David, and C. Massari. 2022. "HESS Opinions: Participatory Digital Earth Twin Hydrology Systems (DARTHs) for Everyone: A Blueprint for Hydrologists." Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, January, 1-38.
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Siqueira, Mario, Gabriel Katul, and Amilcare Porporato. 2008. "Onset of Water Stress, Hysteresis in Plant Conductance, and Hydraulic Lift: Scaling Soil Water Dynamics from Millimeters to Meters." Water Resources Research 44(1): 1-14.
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Telteu, Camelia-Eliza, Hannes Müller Schmied, Wim Thiery, Guoyong Leng, Peter Burek, Xingcai Liu, Julien Eric Stanislas Boulange, et al. 2021. "Understanding Each Other's Models: An Introduction and a Standard Representation of 16 Global Water Models to Support Intercomparison, Improvement, and Communication." Geoscientific Model Development 14(6): 3843-78.
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