The International Union of Soil Science (IUSS) - at its Seventh Congress, at Madison, Wisconsin, USA, in 1960 - recommended that soil maps of continents and large regions be published. As a follow-up FAO and Unesco decided in 1961 to prepare a Soil Map of the World at 1:5 000 000 scale. The project was completed over a span of twenty years. It was the fruit of world-wide collaboration between innumerable soil scientists and remained until recently the only global overview of soil resources.