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Home > Regional Home > MLA/GODORT Read! Campaign > MN Soil Surveys Presentation - Notes
These are the personal notes of Amy West based on the Soil Survey presentation at the 2004 Spring Forum - they may well contain inaccuracies.
- History of Soil Survey
- Soil Survey began in 1899
- first were CT, TX and UT
- Bureau of Soils 1900 - 1933
- Blue Earth County was first MN county surveyed in 1907
- Soil Erosion Service 1933 - 35
- Red River Valley completed in this period
- Soil Conservation Service 1935 - 1994
- coop program with MN Ag Experiment Station 1975 - 1995
- Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) 1994 - present
- To the NRCS additional duties re wetlands were added
- About the Surveys
- A "detailed" survey has the most detail
- A "reconnaisance" survey has less detail
- Current testing standard is 80" depth (prior was no standard)
- Lake, Cook and Pine counties have never had detailed surveys completed
- most of those counties are federal land and there's been no push to get them done.
- Surveys are used for farming, tax assessment (soil productivity potential), planning
- Move to Digitized Versions
- some soil surveys were published in 3 parts: 1=technical, 2=tabular, 3=maps
- there's more of a push from the national level to digitize older surveys rather than doing new surveys
- by 2007 or 2008, will have done all the digitization of all surveys needing updating.
- soil survey "manuscripts" = text only; no maps
- Costs/Advantages of CDs & Web
- costs: $35 per print vs. <$1 per cd vs. pennies for web-based
- last published survey was Otter Tail b/c 1600 copies for total of $75,000. Midwest region said "no more".
- cds can be produced w/in a year; GPO had years-long backlogs on print
- CD is transitional
- goal is web only
- updating is easier
- Caveats
- GIS data is written specifically for ESRI products
- on MN NRCS site, data available in Access only
- used to be ascii, but dumped b/c too hard to deal with (says the agency)
- national soil database is in single location in Ft. Collins (GPO partnership?)
- using the CDs you can't start from a particular soil type and find out which locations have it
- watch out for: inferring too much accuracy at small areas
- no answer right now regarding archiving/historical information on the web access; on one hand, need the most current for program participation...
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