Soil Systems and Landscapes of the United States – Creating a National, Scalable Hierarchy of Soil Parent Material Terms for Teaching.

Soils are substantially defined in behavior, geography, and time by the parent materials (sediments) in which they are formed.  There is a need to develop a nationally applicable, systematic array of parent materials as they relate to soils.  Such an array must consist of various levels of parent material groups, kinds, and subtypes that reflect important subsequent soil behavior differences.  The terms and the array must link widely recognized materials (existing dictionaries) and still allow flexibility to accommodate inclusion of more local (educator determined terms) at the finest scale.  An initial dendogram / decision tree framework is presented to address this issue in support of the ISEE project.  Results have broader applications for recognizing natural landscape units at multiple scales.