Access to soil survey information is provided through maps. All text and tables relate to the map symbols and the areas delineated on these maps. Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of soil survey information should contact the NRCS at the USDA Service Center that services the county of interest. See also the NRCS Accessibility Statement.
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You are here: Web Soil Survey Home / Known Problems

Known Problems and Workarounds

General Issues

Problem Explanation/Workaround
Web Soil Survey doesn’t work if you have popups blocked.

Web Soil Survey opens various content in a separate browser window (a popup):

  • The Home Page opens the Web Soil Survey application in a separate browser window.
  • By default, the PDFs created by the Printable Version control and by Checkout on the Shopping Cart tab are opened in a separate browser window.
  • By default, Web Soil Survey opens external links in a separate browser window.
  • By default, Web Soil Survey opens the Data Available Status Map PDF in a separate browser window.

In order for this to work, you must allow the Web Soil Survey site (websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov) to open popup windows.

You may have popup blocking enabled in your browser, and you may have other popup-blocking programs installed, either as browser add-ons, or as separate applications. Popup are often blocked by more than one application — in this case, you must configure all of them to allow the Web Soil Survey site (websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov) to open popup windows.

If you cannot configure your software to allow popups, proceed as follows:

  1. Since the Home Page always opens Web Soil Survey in a separate window, instead of starting it from the home page, access the Web Soil Survey application directly, at http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/WebSoilSurvey.aspx.
  2. On the Web Soil Survey application page, click the Preferences link in the Navigation bar.
  3. Uncheck “Open Links and PDFs in External Windows”.
  4. Click the Save Preferences button.
The browser window spontaneously minimizes if displayed in other than the primary monitor. On Windows systems with multiple monitors, in Internet Explorer, if Web Soil Survey is displayed on other than the primary monitor, when you change tabs (and probably under other circumstances) the browser window spontaneously moves to the primary monitor and minimizes. Workarounds:
  1. If you are running Windows XP on a laptop with an external monitor, make the external monitor (not the built-in monitor) the primary monitor. Internet Explorer will handle this configuration correctly. See the illustrations below:
    2. external monitor is primary

    External monitor is primary.
    built-in monitor is secondary

    Built-in monitor is secondary.
  2. Use Mozilla Firefox, which handles multiple monitors correctly.
Application terminates with the message “Session data has become unavailable. Your session has been terminated.” Web Soil Survey maintains a session between the server and your browser. In certain cases, your browser will be redirected to a different instance of the Web Soil Survey server from the one on which you established your session. This other server instance does not have access to your session data, and cannot do anything but terminate your session. This usually happens when your ISP changes your system’s apparent IP address. For example, America Online is known to change users’ IP addresses frequently, for security reasons. No workaround.
On Firefox, when first starting Web Soil Survey, you may see the message, “Your Web Soil Survey session has expired.”

In Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers, session cookies are shared among all browser windows. This means that every Gecko browser window open at the same time is associated with the same Web Soil Survey session. It also means that if you do not logout from Web Soil Survey, and simply let your session time out, the next time you start Web Soil Survey, the application will notify you that your previous session has expired.

By contrast, in Internet Explorer session cookies are only shared among browser windows started from the same browser window (using File→New Window, for example). Thus when you start Web Soil Survey in a new Internet Explorer browser window, it will be assigned a new session cookie.

Workaround: When you are done with Web Soil Survey, click the Logout link in the navigation bar. Or if you do see the “Your Web Soil Survey session has expired” message, simply refresh the browser to start over.

Area of Interest and Quick Navigation

Problem Explanation/Workaround
Drop-downs with long options are not visible until clicked. For example, in some cases the Soil Survey Area dropdown has options that are 120 or more characters long. In this case, the dropdown looks as though it is cut off by the edge of the form, but if you click it, the full options are displayed. Workaround: Click the dropdown to see the options.

Dropdown appears cut off

If you click the dropdown, the options are displayed

Navigate by Hydrologic Unit does not work in areas outside the contiguous United States. No workaround.
Navigating to the states of Hawaii or Alaska gives an “Invalid location” error. See the problem Errors crossing the 180° West Longitude line. No workaround.
Quick Navigate to BLM→Alaska→Anchorage gives an “Invalid location” error. The Anchorage BLM office covers an area from the Aleutian Islands to far southeast Alaska, which is an invalid extent for Web Soil Survey, as currently implemented. No workaround.
No PLSS section data available in Alaska. No workaround.
PLSS township borders are not visible in Alaska at a scale greater than 1:100,000. Web Soil Survey turns off township borders and turns on section borders at 1:100,000 scale. In most areas, this makes sense. However, since Web Soil Survey has no section data for Alaska, no borders appear. No workaround.
Some PLSS section numbers end in “D”. In some areas, where a township and the corresponding Duplicate township have sections with the same section numbers, the sections in the duplicate township have “D” appended to their section numbers. Workaround: Check “Show Public Land Survey Layer in Map,” navigate to the township, and examine the section labels in the map. If the section you wish to view has a “D” appended to its section number, enter the section number with the “D”.
No Section data for some Townships. In some cases, you will see an error of the form: “Section not found Section 1 not found in Township 17 North Range 1 East, California, Mount Diablo Meridian,” when you know for sure that the section exists. This occurs because Web Soil Survey simply doesn’t have section data for that section. Workaround: Navigate to the Township and Range, then proceed using the Zoom In tool. Or turn on the “Topographic Map” background layer in the Legend tab, and locate the section you need visually.

Interactive Map

Problem Explanation/Workaround
Errors displaying maps. Sometimes when viewing a map, or changing tab to a tab that displays a map, you may get an error dialog Cannot Display Map or similar. This is usually caused by intermittent network errors. Workaround: Try the operation again, or refresh your browser.
If you zoom to scale using the Map Scale dropdown, then zoom to a different scale, then zoom back to the first scale, your view may be different than the original view. This occurs when your original location is right on a UTM zone boundary, and is caused by rounding errors in map projection causing the zoom centroid to fall on one side or the other of the boundary. Workaround: The only workaround is to zoom from a different location, which is unequivocally on one side or the other from the UTM zone boundary.
Errors crossing the 180° West Longitude line. You will see “Invalid location” errors when you zoom out too far, or when you zoom to a location that crosses the 180° West Longitude line, for example, Honolulu County, Hawaii, or Aleutians West County, Alaska. No workaround.
“Invalid location” errors on zoom. Many seemingly reasonable zoom in or zoom out operations fail with “Invalid location” errors. This results from projection errors, and generally occurs when zooming to a rather large area. Workaround: Try changing View Extent to fit your area of interest better, or zoom in to a smaller area, where projection errors will be minimized.
White backgrounds in Alaska. You will see a white background instead of the Aerial Photography layer in the map in parts of Alaska at scales of 1:20,000 or greater in areas where Landsat imagery is displayed. No workaround.
Parts of the Aerial Photography background layer appear black. This happens in some cases at the edges of UTM zones and at the edges of the available imagery data in the Terraserver. Workaround: Turn off the “Aerial Photography” layer — Click the Legend tab, scroll the Legend down to the Aerial Photography layer, and uncheck it. Then you will see a white background instead.

Soil Data Explorer

Problem Explanation/Workaround
When AOI is in multiple soil survey areas, one of which has no soil maps, Crop Yield ratings may result in the error “Cannot generate a map.” Workaround: Create an AOI for the area within each of the soil survey areas separately.
When your AOI is in a soil survey area that has no soil maps, if you change your map unit selection, ratings you‘ve already run will not take into account your changed map unit selection. For example, create the AOI, select the map units you are interested in (in the AOI Properties panel), then run a Crop Yield rating. In Basic Options, you can select from the crops that are relevant to the map units you have selected. If you later change your map unit selection, the Crop Yield rating form will not update and show the crops relevant to your new list of map units. Workaround: Create your AOI again, and select the map units you need in the first place, or select all map units.

Printable Maps and Reports

Problem Explanation/Workaround
The browser starts up Adobe Reader, but the PDF is not visible. In some cases, Printable Version or Checkout on the Shopping Cart tab creates a PDF, and opens it in Adobe Reader in a browser window, but the document is not visible. Workaround: Refresh the browser window containing the Adobe Reader.
The printable map doesn’t show what was in the viewable map. Sometimes not all the map layers that are visible in the viewable map are visible in the printable map. For example, Water Features lines, Transportation lines, or Federal Land boundaries may appear in one but not the other. The display of certain map layers is controlled by the map scale. Differences in the two maps may occur when the printable map is generated at a different scale than the viewable map. Workaround: Choose a particular scale for maps when creating a Printable Version or a Custom Report.
Custom Soil Resource Report size estimates are inaccurate. The estimates shown for custom report size on the Shopping Cart tab may be as much as 20% different than the actual size of the report. Workaround: Don‘t take these estimates too seriously.
Widows and Orphans in PDFs. In the Printable Version and Custom Soil Resource Report PDFs, the page breaks aren’t always where a human editor would have put them. Sometimes these documents will contain a “widow,” the last line of a paragraph printed alone at the top of a page, or an “orphan,” a subheading or the first line of a paragraph printed alone at the bottom of a page. No workaround.