Towards a European classification of forest humus forms

The Canadian (Green et al. 1993) and French (Brêthes et al. 1998) classification systems are frequently used in an international context, but don’t cover all site conditions of European forest ecosystems. Throughout the last decade, new national classification systems were developed in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. Basic concepts of most national European classification systems are similar along general lines. Nevertheless there are differences in parameters used for description and classification of humus forms as well as in scaling these parameters. This results in incompatibility of classifications on the lower levels of the systems. So, i.e. regional humus forms cannot be described and compared as similar designations of humus forms often having differing contents, and similar contents having differing names. The present paper gives a general outline of a concept on a classification system of humus forms at the European level. As a first step, the classification is outlined for terrestrial (aerobic) humus forms.