Soil Landscape Sytems As a Framework for Understanding and Comunicating Soil Processes, Geographic Soil Information, and for Designing Soil Investigations.

A soil system is defined as a recurring group of soils that occupies the landscape from the inter-stream divide to the stream (Daniels et al., 1999). It can be defined based on similar soil parent materials, geomorphology, local relief, hydrologic connectivity, geographical extent, climate or ecosystem. The soil system approach empowers data-driven understanding of suites of soils and their interactions.  It moves beyond the historical, relatively static, pedon-centric perspective supplemented with expert-assigned estimated data, to a dynamic system whose supporting data is measurement-based.  Soil Landscape Systems can (a) link quantified soil property data to processes at multiple scales, (b) provide and help to evolve conceptual models that explain soil patterns and processes which drive/underlie modeling and digital products, (c) to integrate hydropedology into soil distribution and function models, and (d) to present this information in user-friendly ways.  Its purpose is to incorporate knowledge of soil properties and behavior, soil-landscape relationships, science-based methods, and the capacity to derive and apply quantitative soil analyses.