Exploring USDA's Web Soil Survey Website

 

Web Soil Survey Notes

Note One: Creating an Area of Interest

              Perhaps the most difficult step of using the Web Soil Survey is the first part, creating your area of interest. What I found to be the most effective method for finding an area of interest is using the built in address feature that allows for one to plug in an address and jump to that location. After locating my area, the taskbar tools make it easy to select an AOI using the two red polygon buttons next to View Extent.

Area of Interest (Image Source: Jacob Netzel)

Note two: Navigating The Area of Interest

              Next there is the task of navigating through the data the website has generated of your Area of interest. To do so one can cycle through the soil map and soil data explorer tabs at the top of the page. Soil map provides a base overview of the soil types of your AOE and clicking on each soil type in the left hand graph provides an overview of each soil type. Of great interest to me during this coursework is the data provided in the soils data explorer tab. Here one can look into soil suitability and limitations for use, soil properties and qualities, and ecological sites to name a few. Of these suitability and limitations for use offers a wide scope of useful information, such as vegetative productivity and soil health depletion; a useful collection of information in the field of wetland restoration. Ecological sites provides a bevy of useful information such as dominant land use type across each soil, and the dominant plant species.

Ecological sites of AOE and Extent of Wet Calcareous Depression (Image Source: Jacob Netzel)

 

Note 3: Exporting Soil Data

              The last feature of Web Soil Survey that I used for my examination of this website, was the download soils data feature. Having used this site a few times during my undergraduate, exporting soils data from this site was a simple matter of simply clicking on the download soils data tab, clicking on create download link, and exporting the files to a secure location in my computer. Going a step further I also decided to play with the data files by porting it over to a free GIS software DIVA, with which I created the map below.

Diva-GIS Soils Map (Image Source: Jacob Netzel)

Download Soils Data Page (Image Source: Jacob Netzel)