Traditional and pedometric approaches to justify the introduction of swelling clay soils as a new soil type in the modernized Hungarian Soil Classification System

Our findings confirmed that the swelling clay soils of Hungary satisfy the morphological and measureable physical and chemical criteria of the WRB Vertisol Reference Soil Group. The centroid based taxonomic distance calculations were successfully applied for objective expression of similarities and differences between the examined soil types. The studied profiles and the applied methods justify the introduction of swelling clay soils to the highest level of the modernized Hungarian Classification System. The applied methodology can be a useful tool in evaluation, improvement or development of other soil classification systems.