Post by Nico Stasi

#ROOTS25 – International Workshop on Soil–Vegetation–Atmosphere Interaction, held in Politecnico di Bari: https://roots-25.com/ was an event that brought together researchers working across disciplines to better understand the complexity of the Soil–Vegetation–Atmosphere (#SVA) system. It was meaningful to meet in person colleagues I had only known by name and to reconnect with many dear friends! I contributed to the workshop with four papers: 🌱Thermal Conductivity Characterization of Vegetated and Bare Soils for Enhanced Soil–Vegetation–Atmosphere Interaction Modelling in Landslide-Prone Regions 🌱 Field Monitoring of Soil–Vegetation–Atmosphere Interaction in a Clayey Hillslope for Nature-Based Landslide Mitigation 🌱 Sensitivity analysis of the thermo-hydraulic parameters characterizing vegetation in an evapotranspiration model 🌱 On the effects of root on the hydraulic behaviour of a clayey slope cover I presented two of these works myself, while the remaining two, thank G!, were presented by my co-authors Vito Tagarelli, PhD and Silvano Emanuele Donvito, whom I sincerely thank also for their significant role in organizing the event. I am also thankful to all my co-authors for their continuous guidance, collaboration, and support throughout the development of these works. A special thank you goes to Adelaide Amato, for including me in the acknowledgements of her study: on the retention behaviour of sand influenced by vetiver roots. I am grateful to Prati Armati Srl, with whom I had the opportunity to collaborate during my #PhD in investigating how their technology contributes to slope stability and to a deeper understanding of SVA processes in the South Apennines, Italy. That is way this workshop was particularly meaningful to me! I glad to be part of a scientific community that is actively shaping the future of eco-geotechnical engineering. I am also grateful to Smoltczyk & Partner GmbH for giving me the opportunity to attend and contribute to this workshop. ROOTS25 clearly showed how essential it is to establish a formal interdisciplinary network capable of bringing together geotechnical engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, and plant scientists. We now possess the scientific tools, shared knowledge, and conceptual frameworks needed to actively build and strengthen this cross-disciplinary collaboration. The real challenge ahead is to translate this progress into practice, building stronger connections between research, engineering applications, and policy. If we want to develop climate-resilient and truly sustainable geotechnical solutions, we must embrace a more integrated approach: combines climatic, hydrological, mechanical, and biological processes that are strictly coupled; shifts to predictive and adaptive modelling; relies on long-term, systematic monitoring of Nature-Based Solutions to understand how they evolve and how their performance can be optimised.