A nomenclature algorithm for a potentially global soil taxonomy

作者：Hughes Philip^*; McBratney Alex B; Huang Jingyi; Minasny Budiman; Micheli Erika; Hempel Jonathan

来源：Geoderma, 2018, 322: 56-70.

DOI：10.1016/j.geoderma.2018.02.020

Previous work has been put into the creation of a global soil taxonomy using a harmonised dataset of 23 soil properties at 18 depth intervals. The taxonomy consisted of selected soil taxa from the US Soil Taxonomy, World Reference Base for Soil Resources, the Australian Soil Classification, and the New Zealand Soil Classification. In this paper, a nomenclature algorithm was proposed for this established comprehensive taxonomy. Firstly, a Ward dendrogram was calculated from a weighted distance matrix determined from principal components of the taxa. This dendrogram was then cut at three levels, creating 15 groups, 86 subgroups, and 493 sub-subgroups at tiers 1, 2 and 3, respectively. A sequence of consonants was used to name the taxa at each tier alphabetically with "A" and "E" inserted between the consonants of tiers 2 and 3 and "OZEM" appended after the consonants of tier 1. In addition, a distance-based algorithm was used to allocate and name 10 unknown soil profiles to the comprehensive soil taxonomy. It was concluded that the nomenclature algorithm can be easily disaggregated by computer and can be used to understand the inter-relationships between soil profiles from different classification systems. In the future, there is a need to include other soil classification systems to the comprehensive system and assign different weights to the soil properties and depths used to construct the comprehensive soil classification system.

• 出版日期2018-7-15