Respected all,
I would like to convert FAO soil types such as Regosols, Alisols, Acrisols etc. into texture units such as Sand, Loamy sand, Loam etc. Is there any information or document available for this??. Your kind help will be beneficial for me.
Thanks in advance..
I am afraid it is impossible, because FAO soil type (currently: Soil Reference Group of WRB) is generally not depending on texture. The only FAO types corresponding to particular soil texture classes are Arenosols (sands and loamy sands), Vertisols (clays, and some sandy clay loams, clay loams and silt clay loams containing at least 30 % of high activity clays, mainly montmorrilonite) and Nitisols (as Vertisols, but containing low activity clays, mainly caolinite). However, Nitisols may have topsoil belonging to other soil texture classes (they must have nitic horizon "starting within 100cm from soil surface"!). All other FAO types may correspond to different soil texture classes, generally not included into mentioned above.
For more details see http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3794e.pdf
WRB 2014 is the newest continuation of FAO legend for Soil Map of the World.
Kind regards.
Dear respected,
Michał Stępień
Thank you so much for this useful information. I am still struggling with the soil type provided by FAO and its conversion into soil texture such as loamy, sandy etc. The pdf you have provided is looking very useful. I am trying to get the information from it. If you have some information where one to one relation is described, means if the soil type is Acrisols than its texture would be Loam Silt. please help....
Thanking you again
with regards
Dharmendra Singh, ISRO
Dear Dharmendra,
soil texture class generally was not taken into consideration, when establishing FAO types (exception Arenosols) or their subunits,. Ut may be considered at lower levels WRB 2007 and especially 2014 as suffix qualifiers (WRB2007) or supplementary qualifiers (WRB 2014) but they are not, generally, considered on maps.
For this reason, such relation one to one does not exist (except Arenoslos and Vertisols), moreover, not only Arenosols may have texture of sand or loamy sand in upper layer, other soil types may have sand underlaid by loam (these may be especially Planosols and Stagnosols but not only).
If you want to derive soil texture from map, it would be more useful to see some geological maps, but only dose with upper layer of the earth cover . In Poland such a map is called lithological).
Best regards,
Michał Stępień
Respected
Michał Stępień,
Thanks for the suggestion. It is really valuable for me. We may also have lithological maps for India. I will check it. Your further help may require.
with regards
Dharmendra Singh
ISRO
The question is very difficult to reply as there is no systematic procedure / method for this conversion.
Dr.Ghafoor, you are right. One more important point is we can find out and manage differently the textural types with in a soil order or great group.It is not advisable to pool textural types across soil orders or groups as they are formed under different environments,differ in morphology, chacteristics and mineralogy. So better is to study the behaviour of soil types within a particular soil order or soil group.
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