On the Necessity and Possibility of Modernizing the Methodology of Soil-Agroclimatic Evaluation of Arable Lands in Russia

The methodological foundations of soil quality assessment were laid over a century ago by V.V. Dokuchaev and M. Whitney, who considered land evaluation one of the main goals of soil science. Since then, a large number of diverse approaches to assessing soil and land resources have been proposed and widely covered in scientific literature. In Russia, approaches developed in the USSR over 40 years ago are still used and require modernization. The purpose of this article is to analyze the potential for updating approaches to soil and agroclimatic land evaluation in Russia through the introduction of crop growth simulation methods. To assess potential crop yields, it is proposed to use the WOFOST plant growth model, with modeling results adjusted based on correction factors for soil and terrain properties, as contained in domestic approaches. The assessment is conducted for the ten most common crops. The modeling results for each crop are divided into ten uniform ranks. To obtain an integrated soil and agroclimatic land assessment, the ranks are summed. Individual components of this approach have already been tested in Russia. Implementation of the proposed approach will modernize outdated approaches using modern scientific technologies.