Abstract
AL-Mimouna project is located on the boundaries of Maysan Governorate between the latitude 46 ° 45 '00 "- 47º 00' 00" and Attitude 31 ° 30' 00" - 31 ° 45 '00 ". Project area is about 54460 hac2. The aim was study the variation in soil characteristics using pedological statistics and the application of the numerical classification system with cluster analysis and the principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the 49 field survey sites distributed over seven taxonomic units and selected 21 pedological characteristics. Results showed that the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) extracted 6 main factors which explained 83.2% of the total variance. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth factors contributed 19.9, 17.3, 13.5, 12.2, 12.1 and 7.9%, respectively of the total depending on fixed properties to compare the lower taxonomic levels which due to the marginality among the classes especially the saline horizon problem. The suggested method by using oriented numerical classification with choosing effected properties without use of PCA was the nearest to classify the soil in study area and closed to traditional classification with similarity percentage range between 40-66%.