Just released an updated version of our 'aqp' package for quantitative soils investigations, available on CRAN and R-Forge. Some of the major changes are listed below: from the aqp NEWS file: -------------------------- aqp 0.98-1 (2010-11-23) --------... [Read more...]

Two examples of the output from the profile_plot() function, using data from the Sierra Foothill Region, CA. read more [Read more...]

Fresno Area Urban Areas vs Irrigated LCC: grey regions are current urban areas A couple of maps generated from a 1km gridded soil property database, derived from SSURGO data where available with holes filled with STATSGO data. Soil properties visualize... [Read more...]

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Recently I was re-reading a paper on predictive soil mapping (Park et al, 2001), and considered testing one of their proposed terrain attributes in GRASS. The attribute, originally described by Blaszczynski (1997), is the distance-weighted mean differe... [Read more...]

The rnorm() function in R is a convenient way to simulate values from the normal distribution, characterized by a given mean and standard deviation. I hadn't previously used the associated commands dnorm() (normal density function), pnorm() (cumulative... [Read more...]

Major updates to the SoilWeb iPhone Application. read more [Read more...]

I was recently asked to review a soon to be published book on PostGIS, a spatial extension to the very popular Postgresql relational database. I was very excited about receiving an early copy of this book, as the authors have provided countless tips, ... [Read more...]

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  Parent material data is stored within the copm and copmgrp tables. The copm table can be linked to the copmgrp table via the 'copmgrpkey' field, and the copmgrp table can be linked to the component table via the 'cokey' field. The following queries illustrate these table relationships, and show one ... [Read more...]

  Missing Data Soil scientists routinely sample, characterize, and summarize patterns in soil properties in space, with depth, and through time. Invariably, some samples will be lost or sufficient funds required for complete characterization can run out. In these cases the scientist is left with a data table that contains holes (... [Read more...]

GCS Model Grids Recently finished some collaborative work with Vishal, related to visualizing climate change data for the SEI. This project was funded in part by the California Energy Commission, with additional technical support from the Google Earth Team. One of the final products was an interactive, multi-scale Google Earth ... [Read more...]

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  Premise I was recently asked to print out a fabric pattern that could be used to cover a sphere, about the size of a ping pong ball, for the purposes of re-creating a favorite cat toy (quite important). Thinking this over, I realized that this was basically a map projection ... [Read more...]

Just back from the annual meetings, and it looks like there is a significant interest in collaborative R coding of soils-related algorithms and visualization. A new R-forge site has been created to host Algorithms for Quantitative Pedology. Public release of the 'soil' package should be ready in a couple weeks. ... [Read more...]

  Premise SSURGO is a digital, high-resolution (1:24,000), soil survey database produced by the USDA-NRCS. It is one of the largest and most complete spatial databases in the world; and is available for nearly the entire USA at no cost. These data are distributed as a combination of geographic and text data, ... [Read more...]

Western Fresno Soil Hierarchy: partial view of the hierarchy within the US Soil Taxonomic system   Soil Data Field and lab characterization of soil profile data result in the accumulation of a massive, multivariate and three-dimensional data set. Classification is one approach to making sense of a large collection of this ... [Read more...]

  Premise: The current default database back-end used by the GRASS vector model is DBF (as of GRASS 6.5), however this is probably going to be changed (to SQLite) in GRASS 7. The DBF back-end works OK, however it tends to be very sensitive (i.e. breaks) when reserved words occur in column ... [Read more...]

  CHNOSZ Chemical thermodynamics library and activity diagram software   read more [Read more...]