The World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) is an international soil classification system for naming soils and creating legends for soil maps. The currently valid version is the fourth edition 2022. It is edited by a working group of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS). Background History Since the 19th century, several countries developed national soil classification systems. During the 20th century, the need for an international soil classification system became more and more obvious. From 1971 to 1981, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UNESCO published the Soil Map of the World, 10 volumes, scale 1 : 5 M). The Legend for this map, published in 1974 under the leadership of Rudi Dudal, became the FAO soil classification. Many ideas from national soil classification systems were brought together in this worldwide-applicable system, among them the idea of diagnostic horizons as established in the '7th approximation to the USDA soil taxonomy' from 1960. The next step was the Revised Legend of the Soil Map of the World, published in 1988. In 1982, the International Soil Science Society (ISSS; now: International Union of Soil Sciences, IUSS) established a working group named International Reference Base for Soil Classification (IRB). Chair of this working group was Ernst Schlichting. Its mandate was to develop an international soil classification system that should better consider soil-forming processes than the FAO soil classification. Drafts were presented in 1982 and 1990. In 1992, the IRB working group decided to develop a new system named World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) that should further develop the Revised Legend of the FAO soil classification and include some ideas of the more systematic IRB approach. Otto Spaargaren (International Soil Reference and Information Centre) and Freddy Nachtergaele (FAO) were nominated to prepare a draft. This draft was presented at the 15th World Congress of Soil Science in Acapulco in 1994. At the same congress, the WRB was established as an ISSS working group replacing the IRB. At the 16th World Congress of Soil Science in Montpellier in 1998, the first edition of the WRB was published. At the same congress, the ISSS endorsed the WRB as its correlation system for soil classification. (In 2014, the USDA soil taxonomy also received the status of a correlation system.) At the 18th World Congress of Soil Science in Philadelphia in 2006, the second edition of the WRB was presented, and at