ABSTRACT
Soil phosphorus supply regulates terrestrial carbon dynamics. To improve our understanding of this regulation, we need to improve our understanding of soil phosphorus dynamics first. This chapter first briefly reviews research progress in modeling soil phosphorus dynamics, with a focus on the diversity of representations among models. The chapter then demonstrates how to construct a soil phosphorus model and how to transfer it to a matrix form. Finally, an example study is presented to show how assimilating data into the matrix model can improve our understanding of soil phosphorus dynamics and availability. Overall, this chapter demonstrates that the matrix approach and data assimilation are very useful techniques to study terrestrial nutrient dynamics.
