Soil Taxonomy – Why Can't You be More like Us?.

Whether you are a microbiologist or a soil scientist, taxonomy is not exactly the sexiest of fields. As a soil microbiologist, soil taxonomy seems an arcane area of soil science, with an enormously complex set of rules and a made-up language understood by a few experts, its impenetrability rivaled only by the U.S. Tax Code. I suspect this is true for most soil microbiologists. Because I teach introductory soil science, I’ve had to develop an understanding of these rules and language – enough to give students a taste of what it involves. When students skeptically ask why they should learn soil taxonomy, I explain the need to understand the relationships amongst soils in the landscape, to classify them for scientific and practical purposes, and to have a common set of rules and language that addresses these needs. But I secretly share their skepticism.  One of the problems is soil taxonomy’s apparent lack of applicability to most other areas of soil science. For example, it has no clear connection to soil microbiology: it does not help me explain the distribution of microorganisms or their activities. Perhaps it could, but the learning curve is too steep, and life is short. Furthermore, to an outsider there appears to be no clear set of principles underlying soil taxonomy: the rules of classification come across as arbitrary and seem to expand exponentially with time. So, what to do? One of the saving graces of microbial taxonomy is that it can be linked to function: diseases, elemental transformations, pollutant degradation. It has also moved from classification based on morphological and physiological properties to a system based on quantifiable similarities in the genetic make-up of microorganisms, giving it a much needed set of unifying principles. You could do worse than moving soil taxonomy in the same general direction.