Using Interdisciplinary Approaches to Explore How Climate Change is Impacting the Critical Zone

The Critical Zone, extending from the top of the vegetation canopy to the bottom of groundwater, plays a fundamental role in regulating water, energy, and biogeochemical fluxes that sustain ecosystems and human societies. Climate change is increasingly altering these tightly coupled processes through shifts in precipitation patterns, rising temperatures, extreme events, and land-use pressures, leading to complex and often non-linear responses within the Critical Zone. Understanding these dynamics requires interdisciplinary approaches that integrate physical, chemical, biological, and geological perspectives. Advances in hydrogeophysics, hydrogeology, hydrochemistry, geobiology, and remote sensing have significantly improved our ability to observe, monitor, and model subsurface and surface processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. However, there remains a critical need to synthesize these approaches to better constrain feedbacks, improve predictive capability, and assess the resilience and vulnerability of Critical Zone systems under ongoing and future climate change.

The primary goal of this Research Topic is to address the growing challenge of understanding how climate change alters the interconnected physical, chemical, and biological processes operating within the Critical Zone. Changes in temperature, precipitation regimes, and the frequency of extreme events are modifying water fluxes, biogeochemical cycling, and ecosystem functioning, yet these responses remain difficult to quantify due to system complexity, scale dependence, and disciplinary fragmentation. Such limitations hinder reliable assessments of water availability, ecosystem resilience, and hazard development under future climate scenarios. To overcome these challenges, this Research Topic aims to promote interdisciplinary approaches that integrate hydrogeophysics, hydrogeology, hydrochemistry, geobiology, and remote sensing with process-based and data-driven modeling frameworks. Contributions are expected to advance the joint interpretation of multi-source observations, improve characterization of surface–subsurface interactions, and identify key feedbacks and thresholds controlling Critical Zone dynamics. By fostering the integration of diverse datasets, methods, and conceptual frameworks, this Research Topic seeks to enhance predictive capability and provide robust scientific foundations to support sustainable water management and climate adaptation strategies across different environmental settings.

This Research Topic invites contributions that explore how climate change is impacting Critical Zone processes through interdisciplinary and integrative approaches. We encourage submissions that address key themes, including but not limited to:

- coupled surface–subsurface hydrological processes and their response to climate variability and extremes;

- integration of hydrogeophysics, hydrogeology, hydrochemistry, geobiology, and remote sensing for Critical Zone characterization and monitoring;

- multi-scale observations, long-term monitoring, and data integration strategies to identify feedbacks, thresholds, and system resilience;

- process-based, data-driven, and hybrid modeling approaches to improve prediction of water fluxes, biogeochemical cycling, and ecosystem responses under changing climate conditions;

- applications to water resources, ecosystem sustainability, natural hazards, and climate adaptation strategies.

Submissions should emphasize integration across disciplines, scales, and datasets, and highlight implications for understanding and managing Critical Zone systems in a changing climate.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Critical Zone; Climate Change Impacts; Hydrogeophysics; Integrated Earth System Monitoring; Geochemistry

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.