SOIL, SITE AND LAND CLASSIFICATION

Forest management is a kind of land management, and the forester's attention is increasingly drawn to the physical land base from which forestry values derive.Various approaches to the inventory of forest land are discussed: through soil classification with its inherited agronomic background, through site classification whose yardstick is productivity, through classification using few or many environmental factors, and through classification based on morphological features of the land itself.Purpose is implicit in all classifications and different purposes lead to different classifications. It is suggested that forestry purposes are best served by a land classification which initially breaks the landscape pattern into geomorphological parts, each relatively constant as to surface materials. These can be further divided into relatively homogeneous forest-land patches or ecosystem units, the basis for study and prediction of productivity. As a means of reducing complexity, land inventory needs to be placed within a geographic framework of regions or zones.