Using USDA's Web Soil Survey
My personal review: A tool for Professionals and Land Owners/Land Managers
Web Soil Survey is an incredibly helpful and powerful tool for customized soil investigations. Whether you're a landowner planning a garden or building a shed, or a professional environmental scientist needing detailed soils data for reports, this tool offers a wealth of features tailored to your selected location.
Starting is straightforward: You select your "Area of Interest" by either uploading a shapefile or navigating to your area and draw a bounding box for investigation. For this exercise, I chose to investigate my own property.
I used my property as my "Area of Interest"
Once you've chosen your location you can start exploring all the features and really "digging" into the soils information. The tool allows you to explore the physical properties of soil in great detail, providing valuable information about flooding frequency, landforms, drainage classes, depth to water table, farmland classification, and much more.
One of the standout features is the "suitability of use" option, which lets the user choose specific applications and assess if their soils are suitable for that purpose. This would be particularly useful for farmers, foresters, and land managers. For example, I evaluated my land's suitability for forest, crop, and vegetative productivity. Additionally, the construction suitability category was interesting. It turns out that my soils aren't suitable for building dwellings on - which makes sense because my property consists of our house, surrounded on all sides by wetlands.
Results from the constructability category for my property (both above)
I also tried out the ecological site feature. This function allows the user to identify the potential ecological communities that exist on the Area of Interest. The tool identified my property as largely floodplain - which is pretty accurate, although technically it's floodplain wetlands. When I zoomed out the tool identified many more ecological sites and provided a table with links to a new web page that discusses each ecological site type in detail - including dominant vegetation, geological information, and more. Example: Mesic Alluvium Cool Aspect description.
The ecological site feature could be good for land conservation, for example it could help screen properties for conservation potential/value. Wetland scientists could also use this tool to screen properties for potential wetlands by 1) identifying hydric soils and reviewing the soil morphology and 2) looking at the ecological sites before field delineations. Biologists could use it to identify potential habitat for a particular species; the professional applications are pretty broad with this tool.
Ecological site feature for my property. These links lead to more detailed information.
For professional users, the best feature might be the ability to compile various reports into a "shopping cart" and produce a customized PDF report at the end, complete with maps, detailed information, statistics, and even references. The data download capability is also a nice touch, allowing users to create their own soil maps instead of relying solely on those provided by the tool.
The report I generated included several maps, specific soils information, crop suitability, etc.
GIS data download feature
Overall, Web Soil Survey is user-friendly, especially for those familiar with other online GIS mapping tools. However, it might pose a challenge for those without a technical background. Fortunately, there are plenty of tutorials available to help new users navigate the system. With so many features to explore, the Web Soil Survey is a valuable resource for a wide range of soil investigation needs.
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