Vassili Dokoutchaev

Vassili Vasiliévitch Dokoutchaev (1846 - 1903) is a Russian Géologue having taught with Saint-Pétersbourg. It is brought to study the grounds of its country, at the request of the Imperial Free Economic Company of its city, because one worries then about the disastrous consequences, on agriculture, of the drynesses of the years 1873 and 1875. Traversing Russia, it observes that the grounds are bound, in their nature and their distribution, with the following factors: climate, subjacent rock, relief, time, biological agents (vegetation, animals of the ground).

In the same time, in Western Europe, one believes the grounds especially related to the rocks. To realize that those are under the influence of the climate and are organized, on the scale of the Earth, in large bands aligned on the parallels of the Earth is new for the time. Moreover, to understand that the biological agents intervene is to observe that the ground is the interface between the mineral world (rocks) and the alive world. It is a revolution. A true paradigm. The science of the ground was born, autonomous, and is not any more one subbranch of Geology. In fact, Dokoutchaev is considered, in the Whole world, like the father of the Pédologie. Its ideas will pass to the west because him and its disciples publish in French or German. The team comes in 1900 to Paris, for the World Fair. She presents, in the Russian house, a block of Chernozem of one cubic meter, this ground on which Dokoutchaev carried out its thesis (1883) and which is famous for its richness.

The results obtained by Dokoutchaev are related to the fact that it left its laboratory, traversed the ground, privileged the observation in thousands of sites. In addition to his overall concept of pedology, one owes him also the improvement of the techniques of description and soil mapping.

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