Forest soil scientists recognized early on that they cannot consider the soil in isolation from the trees when evaluating forest nutrient status and the fate of fertilizer. Thus, conceptual models for nutrient cycling (later referred to as biogeochemical cycling) were developed and refined. The scale of this model tended to be at the forest stand level, a logical unit of study for forestry-oriented research. Meanwhile, the ecological community began pursuing the same lines of thought and research, often from a larger-scale, watershed approach. This presentation reviews these approaches from their early development until the present time, examines some of the fundamental assumptions implicit in them, and poses some questions for possible revisions of these models given recent developments in soil science and the nature of biogeochemical cycling.