Short building blocks to devise adaptable soil definitions

Abstract

We provide six short building blocks to devise adaptable soil definitions. These buiding blocks start from a simple and straightforward metaphor and progressively evolve when adopting geophysical, analytical, biogeochemical, cultural, and services-driven points of view. These progressive changes end up with a straightforward, yet most important message for a broad audience. We discuss these building blocks by comparing them to recently proposed soil definitions. Our aims are to initiate a debate on i) what should be, or should not be named soil, ii) what a soil definition should be, iii) the need for both a generic definition and a set of adaptable definitions, based on building blocks, commonly accepted by soil scientists, and iv) the need to adapt our language to diverse audiences. Finally, we propose a definition in one sentence.