Armand Robert Henri Van Wambeke, age 84, professor emeritus of international soils whose automated land evaluation system was used around the world, died May 2 at Kendal at Ithaca.

Born May 16, 1926, in Ghent, Belgium, Van Wambeke taught at Cornell from 1976 until his retirement in 1995.

Van Wambeke, who represented his country in basketball at the 1948 Olympics, earned his undergraduate degree in tropical agriculture at the University of Ghent (1949). After military service, he was a soil surveyor in the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi (1951-60), which formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation at the University in Ghent (1958) on the properties and classification of soils in eastern Congo. This work was expanded in a 1974 publication for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on the management of ferralsols (oxisols), the most highly weathered and supposedly infertile soils of the tropics.

Before joining Cornell, Van Wambeke worked at the University of the Congo, the FAO in Colombia and Nepal, the Belgian Center for Soil Survey and at the University of Ghent.

At Cornell, he regularly traveled around the world in support of soil survey and educational efforts and did two sabbaticals in Ghent. He was fluent in Dutch, French, English and Spanish.

He taught about tropical soils at Cornell, and his research contributed to their appraisal and classification. For 10 years his group supported the international outreach of the U.S. Soil Survey with a series of practical publications on cartography, map unit names, evaluating the quality of soil surveys, and soil moisture and temperature regimes. He gained wide recognition for his research in land evaluation and for developing a computer-based land evalution system with his Ph.D. student David Rossiter in 1987, which has been adopted around the world. He authored a 1992 textbook on the geography, properties and management of tropical soils, which was later adapted by the FAO in 2003 to their new international soil classification.

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Francine Van Wambeke, six of their seven children and their families.

A memorial service is planned for May 9 at 1:30 p.m. in Cornell's Anabel Taylor Chapel. Attendees can park in the city parking garage in the 100 block of Dryden Road, and a limousine shuttle will be available from there. A reception will follow in Kendal at Ithaca. Burial will be private in East Lawn Cemetery.