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Delaware River Watershed Initiative - Soils

2015 - Open Space Institute


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ABSTRACT
Two seamless soils datasets based on USDA’s SSURGO and STATSGO databases were created for the entire DRB region, and information pertaining to various soil-related factors such as erodibility (k factor), available water - holding capacity, texture, etc. were compiled and summarized for discrete mapping units at these two scales. The SSURGO (Soil Survey Geographic) database is compiled at the detailed county-level survey scale that most soil information users are familiar with, and has two basic components: 1) digital boundaries of the detailed soil mapping units, and 2) tabular information on a wide range of soil parameters associated with each mapping unit. The STATSGO (State Soil Geographic) database summarizes similar soils information at a much more generalized “soil association” scale. Both of these datasets for the DRB area were downloaded from USDA’s “geospatial data” site at http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov. Once downloaded, considerable effort was then expended to first seam together the data from the separate states overlapping the DRB, and then to “populate” both soil databases by linking a number of “attribute tables” to the soils polygons contained within the DRB boundary. In this case, over 325,000 soil polygons were populated with information extracted from about a dozen different attribute tables.