World Reference Base for Soil Resources and Georgian Classification

The Caucasus including Georgia occupies a special place in the history of pedology. Especially Georgia as a natural ”Open-Air Museum of Soils’’ caused a great interest among many generations of soil scientists including foreign researchers. In the end of the twentieth century Georgia was the first country in the post-Soviet area where the main soil types were described according to the World Reference Base of Soil Resources (WRB). In 1998–1999 several field trips were organized through the initiative of the Georgian Soil Science Society with the participation of Georgian and foreign pedologists (J. Deckers G.V. Dobrovol’skii S.V. Zonn F. Ugolini H.P. Blume W.E.H. Blum M. Purnell D. Yaalon and others). In 1999 a map of the soils of Georgia was published at the scale 1: 500 000. This was the first important attempt to correlate Georgian soils and the main soils of the world. In 2005 the first translation of the WRB was published. In 2017 the latest version of the WRB published by the FAO has been translated into Georgian language and was finally published as one of the first translations into a national language. Cover image: Caucasus mountains.