Philosophy Behind SoilGen

The soil development model SoilGen is introduced. Four purposes of the pursued model are named, and the consequences for model functionality are identified. These purposes are: (i) its potential use to interpolate the soil status along the pathway from parent material to soil or critical zone in response to external forcings; (ii) its ability to accommodate both yearly and within-yearly variations of at least the climate parameters; (iii) its ability to represent a wide range of processes with different temporal dynamics and their mutual feedbacks; (iv) a maximized process coverage and, in case of incomplete knowledge, the possibility to include user input or empirical formulations instead.