Challenges of Making Fundamental Changes to Soil Taxonomy: Removing Soil Moisture Regime As an Example.

The problems and issues with Soil Taxonomy are many considering that development of the system began in the early 1950’s and it has been in use for 50 years. Over that time there have been many new ways developed to project, view, archive, collect, and apply soils data, and the use of soils information for agriculture as well as other environmental and ecological uses has become widespread, yet the system has not evolved to take advantage of new technologies and is essentially in the same format as it was in 1960. This is not to say that Soil Taxonomy has not grown, over those 50 years a tremendous number of taxa were added to Soil Taxonomy. For example, between 1983 and 2010 over 160 new subgroups were added just to the Inceptisols, yet there have been relatively few conceptual changes to maintain the original goal of a basic system of soil classification. Thus, the system has become quite complex resulting in an increasingly cumbersome document that is even difficult for trained soil scientists to effectively apply. Thus, the question remains, how do we make fundamental changes but not lose the valuable information that is held within each taxa. In this talk, we will discuss the challenges to develop the necessary changes while allowing universal input from the soil and general science communities. We will use the example of removing soil moisture regime from higher level taxa to illustrate these challenges.