Philippe Baveye- Ingénieur Agronome, M.S.E., Ph.D., Hon.D.Sc.
- Professor at Saint Loup Research Institute
Philippe Baveye
- Ingénieur Agronome, M.S.E., Ph.D., Hon.D.Sc.
- Professor at Saint Loup Research Institute
About
351
Publications
186,976
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Introduction
My scientific research interests used to focus almost entirely on soils. Since September 2020, I have still worked on soil-related topics, especially soil functions or the microscale description of soil processes, but much of my writing and activity have focused on economics (related to income inequalities), education theory (especially on self-directed learning), and philosophy of science (perspectivism in environmental research).
Current institution
Saint Loup Research Institute
Current position
- Professor
Additional affiliations
February 2015 - June 2021
AgroParisTech, Université Paris-Saclay
Position
- Professor
October 1984 - January 1989
August 2010 - January 2016
Position
- Professor
Description
- Leader of the environmental engineering group, and Graduate Program Director
Publications
Publications (351)
Soil biodiversity has become a major area of research over the last decade, and the literature on the topic has expanded tremendously in recent years, so much so that a huge number of publications now deal with soil biodiversity every year. This article does not attempt the formidable task of drawing a general picture of where the field is at the m...
Over the last few years, considerable attention has been devoted in the scientific literature and in the media to the concept of “ecosystem” services of soils. The monetary valuation of these services, demanded by many governments and international agencies, is often depicted as a necessary condition for the preservation of the natural capital that...
There is currently a significant need to improve our understanding of the factors that control a number of critical soil processes by integrating physical, chemical and biological measurements on soils at microscopic scales to help produce 3D maps of the related properties. Because of technological limitations, most chemical and biological measurem...
The Saint Loup Research Institute, a non-profit NGO located in France, organizes every year a number of international specialists workshops, attended enthusiastically by small groups of researchers from all over the world, who are attracted by the intense, in-depth nature of discussions in small groups, by the opportunity to network widely, and by...
• Meta-analyses are currently proliferating at an astounding pace in the literature and questions have been raised about their quality.
• The widely used PRISMA 2020 and AMSTAR 2 checklists attempt to ensure the quality of meta-analyses, but they leave crucial questions unanswered.
• There is at present still considerable uncertainty about how to d...
This is the second chapter of my professional memoirs, dealing with my formal education in Belgium (Louvain), and in the US (at Hopkins and the University of California), as well as my informal education during my first job, at the University of Illinois. Throughout the text, I try to document the changes I saw occurring around me in academia, as t...
As a 2009 article on the aggregation of engineered TiO2 nanoparticles has recently reached the 930 citations mark, arguably making it a "landmark" publication, it is of interest to recount some unique aspects of its genesis and of the often hostile reactions to it in the few years after its publication. This story provides insight into a rapid pers...
This letter argues that AI chatbots, like ChatGPT or Bard, should not be allowed co-authorship on scholarly articles because they are not designed to come up with original insight, a condition to be an author, from my perspective.
Over the last decade, the fact that novel perspectives on various aspects of soils have remained strongly controversial long after they emerged, without any kind of consensus being reached about them, raises question about the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. The on‐going debate on the usefulness of aggregates to describe the functions of so...
L'incorporation de biochars dans les sols est communément considérée comme une solution pratique pour améliorer la fertilité des sols et, par conséquent, la biomasse et la production alimentaire de manière durable. Notre étude a réexaminé la robustesse des données sous-jacentes et a révélé que sur plus de 12 000 publications sur les biochars et l'a...
Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Classical methods for the numerical simulation of biological dynamics using meshes of voxels, such as the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), tend to requir...
Journal and book editors in most disciplines are faced with a flood of meta-analyses, which critical reviews have shown are not always of sufficient quality. In the short run, editors could give targeted instructions to authors and make specific recommendations to reviewers to ensure that not only meta-analyses but also research syntheses more broa...
As the consequences of climate change are looming large, agricultural soil carbon credits have emerged as an increasingly advocated lever to incentivize the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and promote carbon storing farming practices. These credits are exchanged on self-regulated voluntary carbon markets, each of them using distinct protocols...
Following the publication by PNAS earlier this year of an article by Beerling et al. on terrestrial enhanced weathering, I thought it would be useful to submit a Letter to the Editor to comment on several questionable aspects of that paper. The format of Letters to the Editor in PNAS allows a maximum of 500 words, which is ridiculously short, and o...
The soil organic carbon to clay ratio (SOC:clay) is a metric used in soil quality management. In Switzerland and the United Kingdom, for example, threshold values for SOC:clay ratios have been determined to indicate very good (>1:8) to degraded (<1:13) soil structures. A recent article in Soil Use and Management by Poeplau and Don, however, suggest...
In a recent, very interesting article published in this journal, Musa et al. [1] review in detail how the presence of microorganisms in biofilms in soils is generally considered to affect their diversity, growth, and metabolism, as well as their ability to fulfill essential functions, such as the mineralization of organic matter and the maintenance...
This study investigates the colloid systems and interfaces stability of cerium oxide nanoparticles in aqueous environments as a function of pH, monovalent cations (Na+) and divalent cations (Ca2+), and humic substances (humic acid (HA) and fulvic acid (FA)). Results show that the solution chemistry affected the colloidal stability and aggregation k...
Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs chercheurs travaillant au développement de modèles « biogéochimiques » ou « à l'échelle de l'écosystème » de la dynamique du carbone dans les sols ont rapporté être confrontés avec un certain nombre de défis difficiles. Parallèlement, les travaux dans ce domaine se sont concentrés exclusivement sur l'activit...
Over the last few years, several researchers working on the development of “biogeochemical” or “ecosystem-scale” models of soil carbon dynamics have reported struggling with a number of difficult challenges. At the same time, work in this area has focused exclusively on microbial activity described at a macro-ecological level, and has entirely bypa...
Over the last few years, in the literature on the incorporation of crop residues in agricultural fields to mitigate climate change, there has been a growing tendency to no longer distinguish between the storage and the sequestration of organic carbon in soils. Applying, apparently for the first time, a simple “back-of-the-envelope” calculation to a...
Over the last decade, the ecosystem services (ESs) framework has been increasingly used to support mapping and assessment studies for sustainable land management purposes. Previous analysis of practical applications has revealed the significance of the spatial scale at which input data are obtained. This issue is particularly problematic with soil...
Terrestrial enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is a carbon dioxide removal technology that aims at accelerating one of the most powerful negative feedbacks on Earth's climate, the chemical weathering of silicates. To achieve this, ERW proposes to spread ground silicate rock on agricultural soils. According to many models, global application rates of 40...
Two very interesting articles published recently in the European Journal of Soil Science address the question of the usefulness of visible-near-infrared spectroscopy (VNIRS) to evaluate soil chemical properties, in view of the suggestion made frequently in the last few years that VNIRS could advantageously replace traditional analytical laboratorie...
Two very interesting articles published recently in the European Journal of Soil Science address the question of the usefulness of visible-near infrared spectroscopy (VNIRS) to evaluate soil chemical properties, in view of the suggestion
made frequently in the last few years that VNIRS could advantageously replace traditional analytical laboratorie...
Over the last two decades, there has been a documented decline in public trust toward science. This evolution has often been attributed to the fast expansion of Internet, making it very easy to spread alternate viewpoints. In the present perspective piece, it is argued that the unethical behavior of some researchers also has fueled the public distr...
Recent research has demonstrated that chemotactic bacteria can disperse inside microsized pores while traveling toward favorable conditions. Microbe-microbe cotransport might enable nonmotile bacteria to be carried with motile partners to enhance their dispersion and reduce their deposition in porous systems. The aim of this study was to demonstrat...
In recent years, the need for profound changes in agricultural practices has become increasingly acknowledged, and it has given rise to an intense, and rapidly intensifying, debate among experts and in the media. Before the general framework under which this debate currently unfolds become too set in stone, it would seem useful to devote some time...
A series of laboratory experiments was performed to investigate the transport and retention of viable C. parvum oocysts in soil columns homogeneously packed with loamy sand soils (Lewiston and Greenson series) and sandy loam soils (Sparta and Gilford series), and under hydrologic conditions involving the presence of an anionic surfactant—Aerosol 22...
Over the last decades, a new generation of microscale models has been developed to simulate soil microbial activity. An earlier article (Pot et al., 2021) presented a detailed review of the description of soil architecture and microbial dynamics in these models. In the present article, we summarise the main results obtained by these models accordin...
Understanding the stability and aggregation of nanoparticles in aqueous milieu is critical for assessing their behavior in the natural and engineered environmental systems and establishing their threat to human and ecosystems health. In this study, the colloidal stability and aggregation kinetics of nanocrystal quantum dots (QDs) —CdSe/ZnS QDs—were...
A renowned molecular microbiologist recently published a book entitled “A world without soil”, meant to make policy makers and the public at large aware of looming threats to soils. The two key messages of the book are that we are “running out of soil” and that, fortunately, “we know how to fix” the soil crisis. In the present discussion paper, the...
Over the last few years, the question of whether soil carbon sequestration could contribute significantly to climate change mitigation has been the object of numerous debates. All of these debates so far appear to have entirely overlooked a crucial aspect of the question. It concerns the short‐term mineralization kinetics of fresh organic matter ad...
In 1991, at the launch of a national symposium devoted to soil structure, the Australian Society of Soil Science invited Professor John Letey to deliver a keynote address, which was later published in the society’s journal. In his lecture, he shared the outcome of his reflexion about what the assessment of soil structure should amount to, in order...
Sessile microorganisms were described as early as the seventeenth century. However, the term biofilm arose only in the 1960s in wastewater treatment research and was adopted later in marine fouling and in medical and dental microbiology. The sessile mode of microbial life was gradually recognized to be predominant on Earth, and the term biofilm bec...
Binary segmentation of volumetric images of porous media is a crucial step towards gaining a deeper understanding of the factors governing biogeochemical processes at minute scales. Contemporary work primarily revolves around primitive techniques based on global or local adaptive thresholding that have known common drawbacks in image segmentation....
This is a citable, non-anonymous peer review of a manuscript submitted to Soil Discussion.
When announcements by molecular biologists and the biotechnology sector are received negatively by the general public or policy makers, the fault is generally ascribed to a general ignorance of science. This short commentary argues that, on the contrary, the problem may be that an influential portion of the public is actually too well informed to a...
Following the rapid development of models to assess and map ecosystem services (ES) in the last decades, there is an increasing need for comparative studies testing their efficiency and accuracy against field data. The representation of soils in these models is often oversimplified and remains a major source of uncertainty in ES assessment and mapp...
This article is a Letter to the Editor on: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15365 . See also Response to this Letter at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15850 .
This is a letter to Waring et al., 27, e15–e16 .
Key points
The ‘replication crisis’ in science raises serious questions about the objectivity and reliability of the peer‐review process.
Much of the literature, contributed on the topic in the past by former editors, has focused on the role of reviewers, and their possible biases.
However, experience in practice shows that editors also contribute...
Macroscopic models of soil organic matter (SOM) turnover have faced difficulties in reproducing SOM dynamics or in predicting the spatial distribution of carbon stocks. These models are based on a largely inadequate linear response of soil microorganisms to bulk concentrations of nutrients and it is clear that a new approach to SOM modelling is req...
The microscale physical characteristics of microbial habitats considerably affect the decomposition of organic matter in soils. One of the challenges is to identify microheterogeneities in soil that can explain the extent of carbon mineralization. The aim of this study was therefore to identify descriptors of μm-scale soil heterogeneity that can ex...
Soil functions, including climate regulation and the cycling of water and nutrients, are of central importance for a number of environmental issues of great societal concern. To understand and manage these functions, it is crucial to be able to quantify the structure of soils, now increasingly referred to as their “architecture,” as it constraints...
Soil “biofilms”: “Bioclusters” would be a much better descriptor
Lehmann et al. (2020) recently published an article in which they propose a review of the very topical notion of soil health and of its practical significance for soil management. Unfortunately, the journal in which this review appeared does not accept comments or letters to the editor, thereby depriving the scientific community of the opportunity...
The recent publication, by the European Journal of Soil Science (EJSS), of two articles on bypass and hyperbole in soil research has given rise to a number of informal reactions, as well as to two letters to the editor, published by EJSS. In order to further stimulate the much-needed debate on these critical issues, I respond in detail to these com...
Advancing the understanding of stability behavior and aggregation mechanisms of quantum dot (QD) nanoparticles in natural systems is fundamental to elucidate their fate and transport, bioavailability, environmental toxicity, and subsequent risks to environmental and public health. This study investigates the aggregation kinetics and colloidal stabi...
Over the last two decades, the sequestration of carbon in soils has often been advocated as a solution to mitigate the steady increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, one of the most commonly mentioned causes of climate change. A large body of literature, as well as sustained efforts to attract funding for the research on soil organi...
Large amounts of chemicals are released into soil environments due to human activities, thereby harming organisms and their habitats. Earthworms are important bioindicators for chemical risk assessments of soil ecosystems, but the question remains of how they respond to different patterns of pollution. Laboratory experiments in soil mesocosms were...
Over the last decades, several authors have suggested that multifractal measures, i.e., self‐similar measures defined on fractal or non‐fractal objects, could be useful to describe soil properties, to model soil processes, and to deal with their extreme microscale heterogeneity. In this context, a key question relates to the extent to which multifr...
For over a half a century, researchers have been aware of the fact that the physical and chemical characteristics of microenvironments in soils strongly influence the activity, growth, and metabolism of microorganisms. However, many aspects of the effect of soil physical characteristics, such as the pore geometry, remain poorly understood. Therefor...
Over the last decade, many researchers around the world have realized the importance for society of the many services provided by soils, and a significant body of research has been devoted to estimating them using various types of proxies or relying on models. However, the field has suffered so far from a complete lack of actual measurements with w...
Over the last decade, computed tomography (CT) images have been used increasingly to gain a more complete understanding of the microscale parameters that control the soil processes. Images that are used for that purpose typically are subjected to a number of successive treatments. This article evaluates for a sandy-loam soil, the impact of two CT s...
Almost 30 years ago, a distinguished soil physical‐chemist, Grant W. Thomas, voiced serious concern about what he saw in the soil science literature as more a preoccupation with style than with substance. The present article argues that, similarly, there are reasons to be worried at the moment because of a tendency in much of the literature on soil...
The literature of the past couple of decades, related to soils, contains many instances of bypass, that is, the deliberate avoidance of part of the older literature in spite of its direct relevance to the topics being covered, and hyperbole, that is, exaggerated claims that are not supported either by existing knowledge or by experimental observati...
In their recent commentary, Borrero-Echeverry and Rincon (2019) argue that some of the points made in our earlier article (Baveye et al., 2019) are “counterproductive, not only to the research on nature’s services, but also to the ongoing struggle to shift to a more sustainable development.” We welcome the opportunity that their commentary affords...
Editorial: Elucidating Microbial Processes in Soils and Sediments: Microscale Measurements and Modeling
Book Review: Pedometrics: How Relevant Is It to the Research on Soil Processes?
Binary segmentation of volumetric images of porous media is a crucial step towards gaining a deeper understanding of the factors governing biogeochemical processes at minute scales. Contemporary work primarily revolves around primitive techniques based on global or local adaptive thresholding that have known common drawbacks in image segmentation....
Over the last two decades, the fact that soils are significant sources of greenhouse gases (GHG), e.g., carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and water vapor, has received considerable attention from the scientific community. Many laboratory and field experiments have been carried out to investigate the release of GHG by soils,...
Three years ago, a novel “soil continuum model” was proposed, in which soil organic matter was suggested to be of heterogeneous composition and to consist of a continuum of organic fragments of all sizes. A search of the literature reveals that this model is identical to several similar conceptualizations proposed about 15 years ago, and that it co...
The very name of this journal, Frontiers in Education, begs the questions of where the “frontiers” should be at present in education research, and how we can ensure that breakthroughs at these frontiers be rapidly put into practice. In this context, this short opinion article argues that in order to answer these two questions adequately, we, educat...
To address a number of issues of great societal concern at the moment, like the sequestration of carbon, information is direly needed about interactions between soil architecture and microbial dynamics. Unfortunately, soils are extremely complex, heterogeneous systems comprising highly variable and dynamic micro-habitats that have significant impac...
For the last 20 years, the concept of ecosystem has constituted one of the key pillars on which the study of “ecosystem services,” i.e., the benefits that human populations derive from nature, has been based. Yet, at this stage, one could argue that, in general and especially in fields related to agriculture, the ecosystem framework tends to limit...
Abstract In spite of the development of new measurement techniques in recent years, the rapid and accurate speciation of thallium in environmental aqueous samples remains a challenge. In this context, a novel method of solid phase extraction (SPE), involving the anion exchange resin AG1-X8, is proposed to separate Tl(I) and Tl(III). In the presence...
Over the last 60 years, soil microbiologists have accumulated a wealth of experimental data showing that the bulk, macroscopic parameters (e.g., granulometry, pH, soil organic matter, and biomass contents) commonly used to characterize soils provide insufficient information to describe quantitatively the activity of soil microorganisms and some of...
There is still no satisfactory understanding of the factors that enable soil microbial populations to be as highly biodiverse as they are. The present article explores in silico the hypothesis that the heterogeneous distribution of soil organic matter, in addition to the spatial connectivity of the soil moisture, might account for the observed micr...
Simplified experimental systems, often referred to as microcosms, have played a central role in the development of modern ecological thinking on issues ranging from competitive exclusion to examination of spatial resources and competition mechanisms, with important model-driven insights to the field. It is widely recognized that soil architecture i...
In spite of the very significant role that fungi are called to play in agricultural production and climate change over the next two decades, very little is known at this point about the parameters that control the spread of fungal hyphae in the pore space of soils. Monitoring of this process in 3 dimensions is not technically feasible at the moment...
Questions
Questions (17)
In a recent article (by Sigl et al., DOI:10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.12.004), several sociologists analysed the evolution of soil science over the last few decades, and one of their key observations is that "While soil science was established as an academic discipline with strong links to agriculture, this link was largely lost around 1980. This led to a perceived crisis of the discipline, which has been followed by a long process of redefining its self-understanding."
In general, I think that any input from sociologists should be welcome. However, in this particular case, I am not sure their viewpoint is correct. I am old enough to remember what happened around the year 1980. I may have missed something, but I absolutely do not think that the link between soil science and agriculture was lost around 1980, as claimed, or at any time since, for that matter. Even when we emphasise environmental issues like climate change or soil contamination (in particular, to try to get funding), the focus of our work still necessarily remains on agricultural (and to a lesser extent forestry) practices, since it is difficult to envisage drastic changes in soils that are not actively managed...
I wonder how others in soil science feel about this notion that the connection of soil science with agriculture was "lost" in 1980.
Over the last 6 years, since the Cop21 meeting in Paris (France), we have heard a lot about the win-win-win or “low-hanging-fruit” solution that soil carbon sequestration is supposed to be for the climate change problem. Over the last 6 years as well, however, sizeable numbers of researchers have raised objections to that view. An example of that is a very thoughtful blog I came across just a few days ago, written by William Schlesinger, the well-known past-president of the Cary Institute in New York State (see blog here: https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/blog-translational-ecology/soil-carbon-sequestration-climate-change-solution), in which he explains why he is “not a big advocate” of the idea, nor of the suggestion that farmers be paid to add carbon to their soils. In a similar vein, in an article that we got accepted by the European Journal of Soil Science a few days ago, we pointed out an aspect of the whole question that, apparently, nobody had noticed so far, and that in many ways makes the whole idea of soil carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation entirely unrealistic in practice. We have posted a preprint of this article on ResearchGate (at url: ). Our conclusion is that it is still very desirable to increase the organic matter content of soils, but chiefly so that soils will be able to keep providing to human populations the kind of services (e.g., supplying nutrients for crop production, water cycle regulation,…) on which we have come to critically depend.
My question at this point relates to what we need to do so that we do not waste the next 10 years arguing about the whole issue, the way, sadly, soil scientists are prone to do. If it is clear that soil carbon sequestration can, realistically, compensate for only a few percent of the total amount of greenhouse gases released annually into the atmosphere from other sources than agriculture, let’s not split hair over whether we are talking about 4 or 4.5%. The message that we should have for the public and especially policy makers is that agriculture cannot be the “silver bullet” some optimistic people once portrayed it to be, and that we, collectively, need to look elsewhere for a solution to climate change, probably first and foremost by reducing emissions. At the same time, our message should include a recommendation that it is crucial and urgent to ensure that soils be resilient to climate change. That clearly means guaranteeing that the organic matter we add to soils contribute actively to maintaining a good soil architecture. Further research is needed to understand how to do that well, but it is already clear that adding almost entirely inert organic matter (like the pyrolysed stuff we have unfortunately heard so much about…) will not do…
Any idea is welcome on how we can carry this dual message effectively and rapidly to policy makers, and shift them away from a path that leads nowhere, to one that may be harder to proceed on but leads to a positive outcome. (For those who need a visual image of that crossroad we are at, have a look at this great cartoon :https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2016/01/20). We do not have all the time in the world to decide which path to take…
