web soil survey viewer

Having just sat down for a bit and played with the USDA Web Soil Survey tool, all I can say is wow. In part I'm amazed at how far the availability of soil science has come since I first learned about it, but I'm also amazed at how much more information is provided than just soil information. Interested in how well certain building materials will fare with certain soil types? It's there. Want to know how feasible it is to install a septic system in a particular area? It's got that, too. What I found particularly interesting was the recreational feasibility tool. I panned around to multiple existing recreational areas, pulled up the feasibility feature layers, and was surprised to find that many of them were placed where the soil doesn't generally support recreational activities. In the photo below, note how red the area of interest (AOI) is. The tabular data would indicate that these areas are too sandy for recreational trails. Local knowledge of the site, however, tells that it is criss-crossed by multiple off road bike paths. Now granted, the red coloration doesn't say it's impossible to have trails there, just that it's not suited for the site. The AOI in this case is about 2,000 acres.


One of the nice touches that I appreciated, though didn't get to play with, was the ability to import (and export!) a shapefile to designate one's area of interest. I mostly work with geodatabases, but it's certainly easy enough to export a shapefile if I was going to use this tool. I'd be interested in how it handles different datums and/or projections.

I also appreciated that while the AOI is limited to 100,000 acres, you can still gather the tabular data for much larger areas (state/county). So while you can't make a nice pretty map in the web tool, that's not what the tool is really designed for.

It doesn't all come up daisies for me, however. I played with the site on both a PC and mobile and while the PC was smooth sailing (even with limited hardware capabilities), one has to get creative to get it to work on mobile -- at least with a few Chrome based browsers I tried. You could use the service, but the functionality was definitely decreased. It worked best when using single touch tools. That is to say, when defining your AOI, use the polygon delineation feature, not the box drawing tool where you would need to use 2 fingers. I don't expect they imagine many people use it on mobile and they're probably right. It has just enough functionality on that end to get you through.

Check it out. Play with it. Enjoy!

 

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