This publication is available in Portuguese under the title “Comunicação, diálogo, conciliação”; it is the result of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) . The Conference called on participants to develop grassroots, participatory strategies in land policy discussions. The Participatory and Negotiated Territorial Development approach facilitates the process of dialogue among all actors involved, including national governmental and non-governmental institutions working on agrarian reform and territorial development issues, in addition ot civil society organizations and interested stakeholders.

These guidelines are based on the internationally accepted Guidelines for Soil Description (FAO, 1990).Some new international developments in soil information systems and soil classification, such as the Field Book for Describing and Sampling Soils (Schoeneberger et al., 2002) and Keys to Soil Taxonomy (USDA Soil Survey Staff,2003), Updated Global and National Soils and Terrain Digital Databases (ISRIC, 2005) and the second edition of the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (IUSS Working Group WRB, 2006) are taken into consideration.

The first official version of the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) was released at the 16th World Congress of Soil Science at Montpellier in 1998. At the same event, it was also endorsed and adopted as the system for soil correlation and international communication of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS. After eight years of intensive worldwide testing and data collection, the current stateof-the-art of the WRB is presented. This publication reflects the valuable work of the authors of the earlier drafts and the first version of the WRB, as well as the experiences and contributions of many soil scientists who participated in the work of the IUSS Working Group on the WRB. Globalization and global environmental issues necessitate harmonization and correlation of technical languages, such as the one used in soil science.

Despite the high demand of natural resources information, many existing maps/digital databases are not developed to really meet multi-user requirements. One of the basic causes (generally underestimated) of such situation is the type of classification/legend used to describe basic information such as land cover and/or land use: many of these classifications/legends are generally not comparable one to another and very often single project oriented. Although there are many classification systems in existence throughout the world, there is no single internationally accepted land cover classification system. Analysis of the physical and human resources information in many countries has revealed the following difficulties: basic information on environment and natural resources are often limited in extent; the quality of existing information is extremely variable and the way it is presented is often not optimal to support decision-making; topographical maps and thematic maps, when available, are heterogeneous; the information provided by the various institutions are often duplicated or inconsistent within the same country; it is extremely difficult to integrate or compare the existing information made available by departments and organizations.