Vision for a future Universal Soil Classification (USC) system
Luca Montanarella
European Commission
My vision for a future USC stems from my past experience in managing the European Soil Information System and the related adoption of WRB as the common system at European scale.
My frequent meetings in various parts of the world have demonstrated to me that there is a diffuse perception in many parts of the world that the WRB is the “European” system, in contraposition to the US Soil Taxonomy as the “American” system. This state of affairs is obviously not sustainable and undermines the credibility of the WRB as the common global system as well as the credibility of the US Soil Taxonomy as an international system, applied and used in many parts of the world since many years.
My personal (biased) observation is that de facto US Soil Taxonomy is used in many parts of the world outside the USA. WRB is applied mostly in parallel to well established National classification systems, where they exist, or to US Soil Taxonomy, for countries were a National system is not available (like my own country of origin, Italy).
I have the strong feeling that the identification of the WRB as the “European” system has been linked to the fact that we adopted in Europe WRB as the correlation system between the various National systems, and also to the fact that most of the scientists supporting WRB come from Europe.
My vision is therefore mostly driven by strategic and organizational considerations, much less by actual technical issues that are beyond my understanding and competences and therefore I will leave to the specialists who are members of the working group.
From my side I consider of crucial importance to have a clear institutional setting supporting on the long term the development and maintenance of the USC. Maintaining a classification system requires substantial financial and human resources that are getting more and more scarce in the current framework of a persisting financial crisis. Only very few agencies and institutions in the world can still afford to maintain the necessary scientific skills and financial resources for maintaining and supporting a soil classification system. It is therefore of crucial importance to first of all underpin the actual (financial) benefits deriving from a global USC, including the possible savings that can be achieved by concentrating our efforts only on one common system instead of dispersing our efforts on many different systems.
If we look at the WRB, there is currently no, or very limited, institutional support to its development and maintenance. The original host of the system, FAO, has substantially reduced its resources dedicated to soil classification. The role of IUSS seems to be a mostly “moral” support and framework without actual resources being mobilized for supporting the system.
The limited support by the European Commission to WRB was originally motivated by the need to have a common correlation system for the European soil information system, but has proven its limits when it comes to the support of a truly global WRB and not of a de facto European Reference Base (ERB).
The way forward is therefore in my view to first of all pool together all National and International agencies willing to support such a new USC and then to invest the necessary time and money in the actual scientific and technical discussions and considerations that are necessary to smooth out the existing differences and still outstanding scientific questions that will led to a truly shared and commonly adopted USC. I’m looking forward to our first meeting to discuss further this interesting topic.