ABSTRACT
Pedodiversity describes soil variety in a particular area systemically, and this variety has a direct or indirect relation with soil types and soil conditions. In recent years, pedodiversity has become an important component of pedological studies (Ibáñez et al. 1995a,b, 1998, Ibáñez and De-Alba 1999, Phillips and Marion 2005, 2007, Ibáñez et al. 2005a, Saldaña and Ibáñez 2007). Toomanian et al. (2006) studied the forms and processes of landscape development and their subdivision in the main region of Zayandeh-rud Valley in Iran. They measured the degree of soil heterogeneity, reporting that Shannon entropy index was a good measure of soil evolution. Minasny et al. (2010) introduced the concept of taxonomic distance to pedodiversity by deriving taxonomic distances in the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB), and compared traditional diversity measures based on abundance of soil individuals with those containing taxonomic distance.
