Abstract. The soil classification system SRTS-2012, in use in Romania since 2013, was made correlated with the previous most recent two systems – SRCS-1980 (used in the period 1980-2002) and SRTS-2003 (used in the period 2003-2012). For that correlation, related to the diagnostic and taxonomic elements (terms) existing in SRTS-2012, some new terms and some modified terms were defined. In order to obtain accurate translation of the terms of the previous systems, three ways were used: (i) previous systems' terms having corresponding current system terms with negligible definition differences are directly translated into these corresponding standard SRTS-2012 terms, (ii) previous systems' terms having corresponding current system terms with non-negligible definition differences are translated into "modified" SRTS-2012 terms (variants of the corresponding terms) and (iii) previous systems' terms without appropriate corresponding current system terms are translated into new-defined terms. The previous systems' terms may be translated into one corresponding term or into a combination of terms, respectively a soil described in a previous system may be translated into a soil association. The opportunity of that correlation was used to introduce new terms for other needs: description of the "land conditions" (relief, hydrology and climate) and "association modes" (frequency, weighting) of soils, description of the "non-soil" areas to be represented on soil maps and other soil characterisations. A notation (specialised language) for mnemonic formalised description of soils is used to provide clear and unambiguous term translation and soil association definition. For that, mnemonic symbols (suggestive abbreviations easy to remember) are defined for each term. The SRTS-2012 soil classification system supplemented with the modified terms and the new terms defined as above (of which the main are given in the paper) is referred as the "SRTS-2012+" soil classification system, which totally has the following structure of diagnostic and taxonomic elements: 65 diagnostic horizons, 24 diagnostic properties, 11 diagnostic parent materials, 12 soil classes, one class of non-soils, 38 soil types, five non-soil types, 117 soil qualifiers, 13 non-soil qualifiers, 14 specifiers for soil characteristics, 61 soil particular characteristics and 306 other low level qualifiers (for defining the varieties, species, families, variants, land conditions and association modes of soils and non-soils).

Key words: soil classification, soil taxonomy, soil classification systems, soil classification system correlation, Romania

Presentation: oral