Introduction
Most countries of the world have some kind of soil survey program. Some programs assess soil resources at the farm level, while others are designed for county, state, or national levels. The United States began soil resource assessment around 1899, but it began an institutionalized, systematic detailed soil survey only in the nineteen thirties. By the end of the nineteen forties, about fifty million acres of land per year were being surveyed and more than one thousand soil scientists from the Soil Conservation Service (now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service – NRCS) and U.S. universities were involved. The then existing classification system did not serve the purpose of standardization, quality control, and communication between soil scientists. It was recognized that the national soil survey program needed a system of soil classification that could be applied uniformly by soil scientists, could be the basis of the soil survey program, serve the purpose of...
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Chesworth, W. et al. (2008). Classification of Soils: Soil Taxonomy. In: Chesworth, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Soil Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3995-9_103
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