5 SoilWeb Field Trip

Soil information is critical to managing our landscape. There were soil mapping efforts in the US prior to the Dust Bowl. However, the need to implement conservation practices on farmland following the Dust Bowl ultimately led to the creation of what’s now known as the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS) as well as that agency’s primary missions – mapping the soils of the US to support conservation efforts. The importance of the nation-wide soils map data has expanded beyond implementing conservation practices on farmland, and is now used by many different disciplines. Examples include real estate development, habitat restoration, land valuation, and more. The USDA-NRCS leads soil mapping efforts in cooperation with many other federal, state, and local government agencies and Land-Grant institutions from around the country as part of the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS). The resulting soils data is contained in five soil databases. Most of the time we access soil data from the SSURGO database, which is the same database used for the Web Soil Survey. Other services and applications also use this database, including the SoilWeb web application that we will use in this self-led laboratory.