Author: Sarah Garre

Jules D’Hoore was born in Sluis (the Netherlands) on 7^th May 1917, while his family was on exile as Belgian refugees during WWI.  After the war his family returned to Bruges where he followed the Greek-Latin option at St. Lodewijkscollege. During the WWII Jules’s university studies were disturbed by the war mobilization and he was war prisoner for a short period. Eventually he obtained his diploma of Engineering in Chemistry and Agricultural Industries from the State Higher Agronomic Institute in Ghent 1943. He stayed on as assistant at the Faculty of Sciences of the State University of Ghent, in the Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry (Prof. J. Gillis).

In 1946, Jules undertook his first mission to Congo as assistant researcher in the Department of Agrology, INEAC, Yangambi. While serving as visiting Researcher of Wisconsin, USA in 1949 he made visits to soil laboratories of the Universities of Ames, Cornell, and Pennsylvania  State and to the US Soil Conservation Service, Washington, DC. In 1951 Jules participated to an OECE mission (3 months) in western Africa in company of L.T. Alexander (USA), R. Maignien and G. Aubert (France), and C. Bloomfield (UK): field study of laterisation phenomena.

In 1950 Jules D’Hoore started his doctoral project under supervision of L. De Leenheer at the then State Higher Agronomic Institute in Ghent (which later became the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Ghent). On 10th September 1953 he defended summa cum laude his thesis with title ‘The Accumulation of free Sesquioxides in Tropical Soils’. He was the first to obtain his PhD at this Institute/Faculty, not his last pioneer achievement. With this thesis he became a world authority on the processes which lead to laterite soils (present-day Plinthosols).

In 1953 he was detached to the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa (CCTA) as Director of the Service Pédologique Africain / Interafrican Pedological Service (SPI). In 1954 Jules was involved in the preparation of the “II° Conférence Interafricaine des Sols” (2nd Inter-African Soil Conference) and the International Soil Congress of Leopoldville, Congo. In this period he started assembling the soil map of Africa at 1/5,000,000 scale. For that purpose he made several visits to the major soil centers of Africa and Madagascar along with field work during numerous soil correlation meetings with regional soil scientists active in Africa.

During his fourth mission to Congo in 1956 he designed a first approximation of the Soil Resources Map of Africa and of its provisional legend. This map was verified during numerous regional workshops all over Africa. The third approximation of the Soil Resources Map of African was presented in 1960 during the 7^th International Soil Congress at Madison, USA. At that time, the baseline documentation of that map, stored in Yangambi, becomes inaccessible, because of the evacuation of this research center. Jules had no other option than reconstituting this documentation by personal mailing to correspondents. He was temporary hosted by the “Service Pédologique Interafricain” (Inter African Soil Service) in Ghent, thanks to the hospitality of Professor De Leenheer and Professor Tavernier. In 1962 he is assigned as member of the “Advisory Committee Project World Soil Map”, FAO-Unesco.

In 1962 Jules joins the Centre for Tropical Soil Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He drafts the Fifth Approximation of the Soil Resources Map of Africa which is eventually published in 1963 in French and in English along with its legend and an elaborate explanatory text.

In 1970 Jules makes a study visit to the Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, USA and studies remote sensing techniques and their usability for soil observation and broad scale soil  mapping. As of then he is prominently present in international fora on remote sensing (ESRO) as delegate from Belgium, among many others the new department of Remote Sensing of the Joint Research Centre, EURATOM, Ispra, Italy. He also was the inspirator of a state funded programme on remote sensing studies in Belgium. In 1976 he becomes the permanent Belgian member at the Remote Sensing Advisory Group at ESA (European Space Agency), charged by the Science Policy Office, Brussels.

Also in that year he is elected President  of the Soil Science Society of Belgium. As of 1977 Jules is  member of the “Klasse voor Natuur- en Geneeskundige Wetenschappen van de Koninklijke  Academie voor Overzeese Wetenschappen” (Class for Nature and Medical  Sciences of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences). He also gets actively involved in the first versions of Belgium-supported Inter-University Development Cooperation with missions to Zambia, Malaysia, Thailand and Congo. In 1983 Jules is  Entitled Member of the Class for Nature and Medical Sciences, Royal  Academy of Overseas Sciences. During his professional career, Jules D’Hoore was honored several times with awards such as the price “Wetteren”, Royal Academy of Sciences, Belgium (together with J. Fripiat), the “Medal Order of the Lion” and “Great Officer in the Leopold Order”.

With his lectures edging at the frontline of scientific development, Jules D’Hoore was an excellent professor, giving his students a world view on soil genesis and soil geography, and a strong feel for interdisciplinarity, as he had worked with agronomists, geologists, ecologists and others during his career. With his Soil Resources Map of Africa he made school internationally and this valuable document still remains till today an important reference milestone from where new tropical natural resources work is starting. Jules D’Hoore’s soil map of Africa was recently the center-piece of the ‘Africa in Profile exhibition’ which was organized at KU Leuven to mark the International year of the Soil in 2016. For the occasion, Jules kindly allowed recording an elaborate interview in which he reflects on his Soil Resources Map of Africa.

Jules D’Hoore from Sarah Garre on Vimeo.

Jules D’Hoore had a somewhat rigid appearance, but in fact he was a sensitive person, with discrete empathy for those in need. He was famous for his erudition, fluency in languages and his interest in art, culture and history, which he liked to share. Jules had a sarcastic sense of humor and a capacity for making verbal caricatures. His speech at the day of celebrating the end of his career will be remembered for two rather ‘Julian’ expressions: he compared the soil to a ‘palimpsest’ – a reused manuscript bearing traces of older writings, and he likened his career as a ‘time of great delight’. During his long retirement period, he kept delight in remembering his achievements and sharing it with visitors.

Jules D’Hoore passed away in his home on 19/09/2017,  a few months after he celebrated his 100^th anniversary with family and friends. He was a great man, a polymath whose stories will continue living on among the large community who had the chance of knowing him.

We end this in Memoriam with two quotes from Jules which we found in his Memoires (Family Archive, 2004):

“…during our long travel through West-Africa for studying laterites in the Sahel, we often slept the night on a roof terrace. Safe of the odd cycads it was dead-silent, the stars hanging high in the sky like balls on a Christmas tree in the firmament. Sleeping in, I was thinking of the immemorial Chaldese astrologists, or better the proto-theologists, who could read God’s will from the run of the stars. They stood round me in a big group and I could recognize Copernicus, Galilei and Kepler. In that that excellent company I fell asleep till the morning chill woke us up to see the first stripe of yet another sunny day… “

“During my career I was able to travel a lot by sea, by land and though the sky… I could reflect and dream away above mountain chains, tropical rain forest, steppes and deserts, icy plains of Greenland, a snow-covered Canada, great water falls … Victoria, Niagara… safe dreaming is never to be taken for granted, also not when watching mother earth from the window of an air plane…”.

By Hubert Gulinck and Seppe Deckers

It is with great regret that I have to communicate the sad news  that Professor Jules D’Hoore passed away on 10 September 2017. As you may remember he celebrated his 100^th anniversary on May 7^th 2017-  http://www.bbv-sbss.be/?cat=261

Professor D’hoore was a great soil scientist who will always be remembered as the author of the first comprehensive soil map of Africa – http://aow.kuleuven.be/outreach/

An extended In Memoriam will follow soon.

Seppe Deckers
President, Soil Science Society of Belgium

Dr. ir. Jan Frans De Coninck, Honorary Professor of Soil Science at the Faculty of Sciences of the Ghent University in Belgium died on June 10, 2017 at the age of 91. “Frans”, as he was known to friends and associates, was a distinguished and inspirational soil scientist, well respected by his peers and especially by the many generations of MSc and PhD students, coming from all over the world, he taught and supervised in the 1970s and 1980s at the International Training Centre for Post-graduate Soil Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium. His professional experience included: soil survey, soil chemistry, soil mineralogy, soil micromorphology and soil genesis. He established an international reputation for his research on the genesis and properties of Spodosols/Podzols.

Frans De Coninck was born on April 24,1926 in Diegem, Belgium and grew up on a farm in the neighborhood of Brussels as the youngest of a family with 7 children. He had always the idea to become a “scientific” farmer. But at the Catholic University of Leuven he was so attracted by chemistry and soil science that the scientific activities became more important than the real farmer activities. He prepared a thesis in soil science and was awarded the degree of Agricultural Chemistry Engineer in 1948.

After his military service and a short time as a Chemistry Engineer in the private sector, he joined in 1951 the Belgian Centre for Soil Survey, and this was the beginning of a brilliant career in soil science. He was chief cartographer and soil correlator in the Antwerp Campine.

When soil survey became too much a routine for him, he started in 1959 to study soils, mostly sandy and glauconiferous soils of his survey area, under the microscope in collaboration with Dr. Jacques Laruelle from Ghent University. Because the microscopic research left many questions on composition and mineralogy of these soils unanswered, Prof. Dr. René Tavernier, Director of the Soil Survey Centre, proposed him in 1963 to carry out a thorough fundamental study on the mineralogy of the soils of the Antwerp Campine, as a part-time researcher at the Laboratory of Mineral Chemistry at the Catholic University of Leuven. In this laboratory he joined a world-famous research team under the coordination of Prof. Dr. José Fripiat and he got acquainted with a series of new analytical techniques in soil chemistry and mineralogy. He gained his PhD in Agronomy in 1967 from the Catholic University of Leuven for a thesis entitled Physico-chemical Aspects of Pedogenesis in the Antwerp Campine and was appointed Head of the Laboratory at the Department of Regional Pedology of the same university.

In 1968, Frans De Coninck joined the Ghent University and became Head of the Laboratory for Soil Analyses at the Department of Physical Geography and Regional Pedology (Head: Prof. Dr. René Tavernier); a position he held until his retirement. His research interests included the investigation of soil forming processes and mineralogy of soils from all over the world, but preferentially Podzols. His investigations on spodic materials showed the usefulness of soil micromorphological information in studies of Spodosol genesis. He did groundbreaking research, especially in micromorphology of Podzols in close collaboration with French soil scientists, i.a. Dominique Righi, and contributed in this way to the improvement of the classification of Spodosols in Soil Taxonomy. His research findings on podsolization were compiled in a book “Genesis of Podzols” with which he obtained in 1981 the Aggregate for Higher Education and became in 1982 the Laureate of the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium.

Dr. De Coninck was active in several professional societies. He was Vice-President of Commission VII (Soil Mineralogy) of the International Society of Soil Science and European Coordinator of the ICOMOD-Commission (Spodosols) of the Soil Conservation Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)..

In 1989, Dr. De Coninck was appointed Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Regional Pedology and Land Evaluation, Ghent University. After his retirement in 1991, Prof. Dr. De Coninck was until 1996 still active as the chairman of the Soil Experts Group of an International co-operative programme on assessment and monitoring of air pollution effects on forests in the ECE region, sponsored by UNEP-UNECE.

Em. Prof. Dr. Eric Van Ranst
Ghent University, Belgium