Inconsistencies in Terminology and Definitions of Organic Soil Materials.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil organic matter (SOM) have become two of the most studied aspects of soils in the last several decades. These studies are being driven by a number of environmental issues; primarily global warming relative to greenhouse gases and wetland identification and delineation. The scientific community relies on soil scientists to describe and inventory our soil resources in order to model and quantify the carbon stored in our soils. In addition to inventorying SOC stocks, the identification of carbon-rich soil horizons has become one the more important aspects in the identification of hydric soils for delineation of jurisdictional wetlands. In a similar manner, soil classification requires identification of organic soil materials and the degree of decomposition for identifying soils at the order, suborder, great group, and subgroup levels. As a part of a study of freshwater subaqueous soils, we investigated the methods and approaches to classify organic soil materials.  In this paper, we report our results and discuss these results in the context of some of the terminology and definition inconsistencies relative to organic soil materials that exist in the national standards for inventorying and classifying subaerial and subaqueous soils.