These distinctions are often based on characteristics important to land management and largely they have been ignored by the scientific community until recently, with anthropologists and geographers being the first to document them. Vernacular systems can provide outsiders a language to communicate with local land users, especially regarding agricultural management and resource tenure. Vernacular systems can also provide technicians and scientists insight into natural resource management systems that can prove valuable in inventorying and developing local resources. The anthropologist Harold C. Conklin first started documenting vernacular systems in the 1950s. Scientific Systems Scientific systems are of two types, those based on processes of soil development or genesis and those based on quantifiable characteristics.
Many systems have elements of both types.
Criteria for distinguishing soils among these systems are by no means uniform. The structure of these systems can be hierarchical, descriptive, or nominal. Also, soil classification systems are not static. As knowledge is gained old systems and class names are changed for new ones, as with plant and animal classification systems. These differences in classification systems make it important to include descriptions of classified soils when reporting so that correlation to other systems is possible.