EUROPEAN SOIL BUREAU RESEARCH REPORT NO. 7 World Reference Base for Soil Resources – in a nutshell

Since its endorsement by the IUSS in 1998, the World Reference Base for Soil Resources has established itself as a comprehensive soil correlation system. The system has so far been translated into 9 languages and is used and tested all over the world. This paper describes the WRB in a nutshell. Although originally designed for general-purpose soil correlation at world scale, WRB is increasingly used as a classification system. The issue of strict ranking of taxa and the rationale behind ranking have been major points of debate; a ranking scenario is presented here, mainly to stimulate the discussion