SOIL MATERIALS, A LAYER BASED APPROACH TO SOIL DESCRIPTION AND CLASSIFICATION

The Soil Conservation Service of New South Wales (Australia) is mapping soil landscapes at a scale of 1:100,000 and is using a soil layer based entity, termed soil materials, as the basic entity for soil description and classification. Soil materials are defined as three dimensional soil entities which have a degree of homogeneity and lateral continuity. They are defined on their morphological properties and not their position in the profile and they can include both solum and non-solum material. This paper describes the approach, gives an example of its use and discusses its perceived benefits.