2005 MO-16 Soils Newsletter - Spring

Message From The MO Leader’s Desk

By Luis Hernandez
MO-16 Team Leader

Greetings everyone! I am very pleased to present this first edition of The MO-16 Soils Newsletter.

The newsletter is a tool to communicate information on soil surveys, soils technical services, soil survey-related research and transfer technology throughout the region. It also serves as a communication tool among NRCS and National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) cooperators.

Let me take this opportunity to thank all the people who contributed to this edition of The MO-16 Soils Newsletter. I also would like to encourage soil scientists and NCSS cooperators within the region to submit articles for the next edition of the newsletter. It will be published twice a year.

The 2005 NCSS Conference is planned for the week of May 21-26, 2005, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Please mark your calendar!! For additional information and details, please review the NCSS Conference article included in this edition of the newsletter.

Performance Progress

In the past 10 years, MO-16 has completed soil survey quality assurance of 16.8 million acres throughout 8 states within the region. NRCS has completed mapping of 12.7 million acres; NCSS cooperators have contributed with the mapping of 4 million acres. It is clear that NRCS alone could not carry out such an accomplishment without help from NCSS cooperators.

In FY 2005, MO-16 will conduct quality assurance of almost 2 million acres. NCSS cooperators will contribute with the modernization of 196,393 acres. As of now, MO-16 has completed quality assurance of 303,507 acres.

Soil Data Quality Specialists have assisted Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas in correlation activities such as initial field reviews, technical visits, and progress field reviews.

Soil Data Quality Specialists have completed technical edits and technical reviews of soil survey manuscripts for Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. They have also provided quality review of soils data in NASIS for Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas. MO-16 has completed compilation certification of 10 counties for Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, and SSURGO certification of several counties in Arkansas and Texas.

The MO-16 editor has completed English editing of soil survey manuscripts for Arkansas and Missouri. The editor also has assisted Arkansas and Missouri with the publication of soil surveys on CD and online format.

MO-16 Staffing

MO-16 is in the process of hiring two Soil Data Quality Specialists. One position will be based in Alexandria, Louisiana, and the other position will be based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

MO-16 Umbrella Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

The first draft of the MO-16 Umbrella MOU has been completed and circulated among MO-16 State Soil Scientists for comments. Comments and suggestions were incorporated into the document and the MOU will go out to the states for signatures within a month or so.

Luis A. Hernandez, CPSC, CPSSc State Soil Scientist/MLRA Leader

MO-16 Office Hosts NASIS Training Session

By Edgar Mersiovsky
Assistant State Soil Scientist
Little Rock, Arkansas

The M0-16 office in Little Rock, Arkansas, hosted a training session in the development of soil interpretations using NASIS.

The training session was held January 25-27, 2005, and was taught by Bob Dobos, Soil Scientist on the National Soil Survey Interpretations Staff at the National Soil Survey Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Edgar Mersiovsky, Assistant State Soil Scientist in Little Rock assisted during the session. Training participants were from Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Dakota. The 2½ day session included topics in development of soil property queries, evaluating soil properties, rating the soil properties, and combining soil properties for a soil interpretation.

Training participants worked in groups to develop their own soil interpretations and were also taught how to debug their soil interpretations and how to insert them into reports. Another NASIS training session will be hosted by MO-16 on April 26-28, 2005, in Little Rock. This training session will include topics in report writing.

The Missouri Soil Survey Website

By Bryan Mayhan
Center for Agricultural, Resource and Environmental Systems (CARES)
University of Missouri

The Missouri Cooperative Soil Survey (MCSS) website is a state cooperator with the National Cooperative Soil Survey in Missouri and is funded through a grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources Soil and Water Conservation Program.

The MCSS website consists of the 94 available Missouri soil surveys (106 total) in Microsoft® Access database-Active Server Page format and in Adobe PDF format, mirroring the CD-ROM product.

The remaining soil surveys will be added as they become available from NRCS. Online Thundersheets and Soil Survey Legends for all soil survey areas in Missouri are constructed directly from SSURGO II tabular data.

A link is provided to more detailed map unit information on both the Thundersheet and Legend pages. The data is as “fresh” as the latest SSURGO download from the NRCS Soil Data Warehouse. The website is integrated with the Missouri Map Room, an ESRI ArcIMS®-based Internet Map Server (IMS) with over 5,000 GIS layers (1.2 Terabytes) available to the user. This IMS contains the soil geography for all 106 Missouri soil surveys, which can be displayed with hill-shaded relief models, 7.5’ topographic maps, two dates of aerial photography, etc.

Within the IMS are analysis tools, such as the Area Summary tool, used to perform rudimentary analysis, such as quantifying the soil map units within a tract of land. The construction of the soil survey layer allows for cross-boundary analysis.

The MCSS contains approximately 6,000 soil series and map unit distribution maps, which are constructed directly from the SSURGO spatial data. These pages contain navigation links that allow the user to view all distributions for a series as well as read the descriptions (by survey) for the map series and map units.

There are also links to the Missouri MLRA map and descriptions. Missouri has its own Soil Characterization Laboratory housed at the University of Missouri. MCSS delivers most of its analyses through the web via the Pedon Data Site. This is the only login protected area of the site.

The login system helps us determine who is using the site and is provided free of charge.

There is a mapping component and a query component to the Pedon Data Site. The query component allows the user to view pedons selected through the query page. From the results page, the user may view the narrative form, lab data, official series description, original narrative submitted with the laboratory samples, the soil survey report, distribution maps, and even map the location of the pedon within an IMS (mapping component).

The Pedon Data Site is a full-service pedon data entry and retrieval system with a layout that was designed by field soil scientists.

The user may digitize a pedon within the mapping component and have many of the site specific data elements populated for him or her. These include soil survey area, county, state, country, MLRA, LRR, physiographic hierarchy, topographic quadrangle, etc. Also, the location is recorded in three systems: UTM, Lat-Long (DMS), and a legal description. Elevation, slope, aspect, and slope shape are also initialized for the user. All of these values are transferred into a Site Data Description form for editing and submission into the standard NRCS Pedon Microsoft Access Database used with NRCS’ Windows Pedon. Upon entry of the site data (about a 10 minute process), the horizon description may be entered.

The whole process can be completed in about an hour for an eight horizon pedon. The system also allows for the upload and display of photographs. In the future, we will be adding verification tools to help the soil scientist verify taxonomic classification, correct horizon nomenclature, diagnostic horizons, etc.

We are also working on tools for statistically analyzing the properties of pedons within various populations, such as series and map units. This will aid the field soil scientists conducting soil survey efforts in Missouri.

This system is technologically portable. While Missouri is the focus of this website because of funding, it has been constructed so that other states may be added. Both data entry and display forms can be tailored to access the databases and retrieve data in any number of formats desired. The databases utilized on the website are standard NRCS database products to facilitate data sharing, usage, and synchronization.

The site data is populated directly from NASIS site data downloads meeting Missouri certification requirements. There are provisions for extracting data sets from this site for upload as a pedon database to NASIS.

Monthly usage of the website averages about 80,000 page views. There are approximately 2,500 unique visitors with 800 visiting more than once with over 6,000 user sessions – about 200 per day. The website has been online in some form since 1998, but since we began tracking usage in August 2002, there have been over 1.8 million “hits” from almost 35,000 unique users; 7,000 have returned more than once.

Water Table Study

By Edgar Mersiovsky
Assistant State Soil Scientist
Little Rock, Arkansas

The objective of the Water Table Study is to collect soil and water data for soils and landform positions throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley in a comprehensive and uniform manner. Collected data will be used to assist in populating the NASIS database and to refine interpretations affected by soil water data.

The equipment used to monitor the water table status is a WL-15 Water Logger combination, which includes a pressure transducer, 6 feet or 12 feet cable, data logger, and Windows compatible software. Initially, soils along the Mississippi River Meander Belts in MLRA 131A as mapped by Roger Saucier will be studied.

Soils with family particle sizes of fine-loamy, fine-silty, or coarse will be considered. Sites are located in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri. Similar installations are being made in MO-11 and MO-15.

2005 National Cooperative Soil Survey Conference Planned for Corpus Christi, Texas, in May 2005

The 2005 National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) Conference is planned for May 21-26, 2005, in Corpus Christi, Texas, at the Omni Corpus Christi Hotel, Marina Tower, 707 N. Shoreline Boulevard.

The NRCS Soil Survey Staff in Temple, Texas, and the Agricultural Experiment Station at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, are co-hosts of this conference. Room rates will be $76 for single and $86 for double under the block of reserved rooms for U.S. Department of Agriculture. Call 1-800 THE-OMNI (1-800-843- 6664) for reservations by Tuesday, May 3, 2005. Emergency cancellations are by noon on the day of arrival. A small registration fee is planned to cover field trips, receptions, and refreshments.

The theme of the Conference will be Planning the New Soil Survey—Personnel Development, Technology, Standards, and Electronic Delivery. The draft agenda and descriptions of field tours and committees are on the internet at http://soils.usda.gov/partnerships/ncss/conferences/index.html.

NCSS intends to highlight two optional field tours for the conference: King Ranch, Saturday, May 21 (afternoon/half day) and Padre Island National Seashore, Sunday, May 22 (full day). The official conference will commence with a reception on Sunday evening, May 22, and continue through Wednesday evening, May 25, with workshops, speakers, and committee meetings. There will be seven committees (three standing committees and four in-house committees), which began deliberations by e-mail and teleconference in February 2005.

Final reports will be given at the conference. All NCSS cooperators and interested parties are welcome to review the charges of the committees and contribute comments to the reports. We anticipate full participation of partners and cooperators in this critical work planning activity for the NCSS.

NCSS Conference 2005 Standing Committees

Research Agenda

Co-Chair: David Hammer, National Leader for Investigations, NRCS, NSSC (david.hammer@usda.gov) Co-Chair: Nancy Cavallaro, Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), Soils (ncavallaro@csrees.usda.gov)

NCSS Standards Co-Chair: Craig Ditzler, National Leader for Classification and Standards, NSSC, NRCS (craig.ditzler@nssc.nrcs.usda.gov) Co-Chair: Duane Lammers, U.S. Forest Service (dlammers@fs.fed.us) Co-Chair: Colin Voigt, Bureau of Land Management (colin_voigt@blm.gov)

New Technology

Co-Chair: Pete Biggam, U.S. National Park Service (pete_biggam@nps.gov) Co-Chair: Jon Hempel, Director of National Geospatial Development Center, NRCS (jon_hempel@usda.gov)

IN-Conference 2005 Committees

Committee 1: WEB Soil Survey—Promoting Partnerships This committee should consider issues concerning WEB Soil Survey standards, product delivery, marketing strategies, public access to expertise, product timeliness, and education on product use with an emphasis on promoting partnerships. Co-Chair: Dennis Lytle, MLRA Coordinator, Soil Survey Division, NRCS (dennis.lytle@usda.gov) Co-Chair: Rick Day, Pennsylvania State University, University Park (rday@psu.edu)

Committee 2: Ecological Principles in Soil Survey This Committee should review classical references and University curricula for ecological principles and associations with soil and natural resource inventories. This Committee should investigate new interpretations and management recommendations associated with state and transition models; ecological frameworks; ecological site inventories and ecological land use inventories and discuss how they may be incorporated into soil survey. Co-Chair: Curtis Talbot, Rangeland Management Specialist, NSSC, NRCS (curtis.talbot@usda.gov) Co-Chair: Randy Davis, U.S. Forest Service (rdavis03@fs.fed.us)

Committee 3: Recruitment and Retention of Soil Scientists in Soil Survey This committee is to concern itself with recruitment and retention of Soil Scientists in soil survey and soil resource management. Co-Chair: Gary Steinhardt, Purdue University, Indiana (gsteinhardt@purdue.edu) Co-Chair: Denise Decker, Human Resources Management Division, NRCS (denise.decker@usda.gov) 9 Co-Chair: Luis Hernandez, MO Leader/State Soil Scientist, NRCS, Arkansas (luis.hernandez@ar.usda.gov)

Committee 4: Water Movement and Water Table Monitoring in Soil Survey This committee will explore and discuss how soil survey should address water movement and water tables for regional updates of the soil survey and database representation. Co-Chair: Henry Lin, Pennsylvania State University (henrylin@psu.edu) Co-Chair: Cathy Seybold, Soil Scientist, NRCS (cathy.seybold@usda.gov)

MO-16 Upcoming Soil Survey Activities

• Pike County, Arkansas, Correlation Meeting, March 22-24, 2005

• Missouri Soil Survey Planning Conference, March 31, 2005

• East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Final Correlation, April 4, 2005

• Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, Progress Field Review, April 18, 2005

• Benton and Henry Counties, Tennessee, Field Assistance, April 25-29, 2005

• NASIS–Basic Report Writing, Little Rock, Arkansas, April 26-28, 2005

• Bossier Parish, Louisiana, Correlation Meeting, May 10-12, 2005

• NCSS National Conference, Corpus Christi, Texas, May 21-26, 2005

• Wilkinson County, Mississippi, Final Field Review, May 23, 2005

• MO-16 Board of Directors Meeting, Corpus Christi, Texas, May 25, 2005

• Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana, Initial Field Review, June 6, 2005

• Arkansas Soil Survey Planning Conference, Little Rock, Arkansas, June 21-23, 2005

• Dexter and Union Counties, Missouri, MLRA Office Assistance, June 21-23, 2005

• Clinton and Springfield Counties, Missouri, MLRA Office Assistance, June 28-29, 2005

• Ballard and McCracken Counties, Kentucky, Final Field Review, June (date to be determined)

• St. James Parish, Louisiana, Progress Field Review, July 18, 2005

• Caddo Parish, Louisiana, Progress Field Review, July 25, 2005

• Tyler County, Texas, Sampling Trip, August 8-12, 2005

• Tyler County, Texas, Final Field Review, August 22-26, 2005

• Benton and Henry Counties, Tennessee, Progress Field Review, September 12-16, 2005

• San Augustine and Sabine Counties, Texas, Progress Field Review, September 19-23, 2005
  

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