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A Bird’s Eye View of Soils
NRCS conservationist in South Dakota demonstrates the new Bird’s Eye
View of Soils exhibit |
NRCS South Dakota demonstrated its new Bird’s Eye View
of Soils exhibit at the 2004 South Dakota State Fair and several
other events around the State. The exhibit depicts detailed information
available from Bird Eye’s digitized soil
survey data. “By digitizing soil surveys, we were able to produce
Bird’s Eye View of
Soils,” explains NRCS State Soil Scientist Jerry Schaar.
“The neat thing about this project is the user’s ability to quickly look up
soils information for the entire State,” explains
Bird’s Eye developer Missy Mathis, GIS specialist in the Pierre
field office.
So why is this important? This digital soils information can provide a wealth of
information for ranchers, farmers, homeowners, realtors, scientists, and
teachers. With ArcExplorer’s free Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software,
users can view soils data on many levels. Users, for example, can see colored
areas over an aerial photo showing everything from a pasture’s soil quality, to
locations where the soil could cause foundation problems making it unsuitable
for building. “We’re packaging soils interpretations together to save time,”
explains Schaar. “When we’ve had soils information requests in the past, we
provided the whole soil survey report. It might have taken several hours to
analyze and interpret the information.”
Bird’s Eye starts with a view of the
Digital Elevation Model of South Dakota. The user can then select a county
and with just the click of a mouse zoom in from a county to an area view. At a
certain scale, a digital orthophoto (with or without the soil lines and symbols)
can be viewed. Five soil interpretations are available including soils
productivity index, favorable range productivity, organic matter content,
salinity for the surface layer, and sewage lagoon rating.
Your contact is Jerry Schaar, NRCS State Soil Scientist, at 605-352-1200, or
jerry.schaar@sd.usda.gov.
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