Integrating Soil Landscape Systems into Decsion Making for Resource Management.

For the past 5 decades, the field of pedology has had a strong focus in characterization, taxonomy, and mapping of soils as discrete elements of landscapes, delineated by sharp, distinct boundaries (map polygons), each related to soil taxonomic/morphologic differences.  Traditional soil map products capture soils without explicitly illustrating their functions. Users and stakeholders of this accumulated soil knowledge base were primarily in the agricultural domain. In recent years, the field of pedology has evolved, in concert with theoretical and computer advances, to undertake new areas of application beyond agriculture, and to generate new products that replace the traditional paper soil maps. Spatial-temporal scales and uncertainty quantification of soil processes and functions will be discussed as some of the major challenges and concepts that US Soil Survey need to embrace.  Through contemporary examples we elaborate some ideas on how Soil landscape systems as one of the fundamental paradigms of soil survey can be enhanced to provide necessary data and information for understanding the role of soil and the associated functions within the ecosystem for aiding decision makers in managing the natural resources.