Abstract. Soil research institutes from 5 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic) cooperated during 2 years in the assessment of structure in agricultural soils. The project was financed by the Austrian Governement and coordinated by the Institute of Soil Research of the University of Agriculture in Vienna, Austria. The cooperation was organized on the base of 4 work-hops and each partner institution analysed typical and representative soil of each country with general methods standarized within the research group and used by all partners as well as by specific methods only used by individual institutes. The investigations resulted in a large number of data, characterizing a broad spectrum of soils. The most important result of this project is a classification of specific physical, chemical and biological methods for the description of different soil functions related to structure, aiming of soil as a porous medium, transport medium, transformation me­dium and biological habitat. Moreover, the applicability of these methods under specific and site conditions (eg., texture, salt content, water regime etc.) was analyzed.