Mapping near Paloma, CA This image has nothing to do with the following content. A quick example of how to use the USDA-NRCS soil data access query facility (SDA), via the soilDB package for R. The following code describes how to get component-level so... [Read more...]

Continuing the previous discussion of pair-wise dissimilarity between soil profiles, the following demonstration (code, comments, and figures) further elaborates on the method. A more in-depth discussion of this example will be included as a vignette w... [Read more...]

Dendrograms are a convenient way of depicting pair-wise dissimilarity between objects, commonly associated with the topic of cluster analysis. This is a complex subject that is best left to experts and textbooks, so I won't even attempt to cover it her... [Read more...]

Previously, soil profile comparison methods from the aqp package only took into account horizon-level attributes. As of last week the profile_compare() function can now accommodate horizon and site-level attributes. In other words, it is now possible t... [Read more...]

Here is a quick, draft demo on extracting soils data from a PedonPC database, and performing some common analysis with functions from AQP. The newly released soilDB package makes it possible to rapidly extract soils data from PedonPC, local NASIS, and ... [Read more...]

Version 1.0 of AQP is nearly ready-- after nearly 3 years of development, 2 years on R-Forge, and 1+ year on CRAN. Just pushed version 0.9-9 to R-Forge, and it should be on CRAN within a couple days. Recent changes are listed below, clipped from the NE... [Read more...]

A friend of mine recently published a very interesting article on the pedologic interpretation of asymetric peak functions fit to soil profile data (Myers et al., 2011). I won't bother summarizing or paraphrasing the article here, as the original artic... [Read more...]

Users of our Google Earth interface to USDA-NCSS soils information will now see links to soil-landscape block diagrams listed within map unit descriptions. Automated Linking to NCSS Block Diagrams read more [Read more...]

A map depicting the spatial distribution of a given soil series can be very useful when working on a new soil survey, updating an old one, or searching for specific soil characteristics. We have recently added a soil series query facility to SoilWeb, w... [Read more...]

SoilWeb is an interactive, multifaceted interface to USDA-NCSS soil survey information. Our SoilWeb application for Google Earth streams soil map units and point data as you navigate across the lower '48 states. Currently, our system imposes a 30,000 ... [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...]

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

  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...]

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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...]

Rapid urban and sub-urban expansion in the San Joaquin Valley have resulted in the loss of millions of acres of prime farmland in the last 100 years. Approximately 11% of class 1 (irrigated) land and 7% of class 2 land have already been paved over in the Fresno-Madera region (first image below). Recent projections in ... [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...]