Developing a Soil/Terrain Geospatial Database to Support Soil Carbon Mapping.

The Regional Approaches to Climate Change for Pacific Northwest Agriculture (REACCH PNA) project is a five-year USDA NIFA-funded interdisciplinary project examining the sustainability of cereal crop production systems in the Pacific Northwest, in relation to potential climate change.  This talk outlines the background and methods for building a soil carbon map for the REACCH region (primarily in Washington with some areas in Idaho and Oregon) that can serve as a foundation for studying and monitoring carbon dynamics.  Soil carbon is primarily associated with soil organic matter and is a proxy for many soil properties related to resiliency and soil health for agriculture. It is also a critical base product for understanding soil-atmospheric carbon flux, which is a significant part of the overall carbon budget of the Earth (Lal 2004).  The goal of this project will be to collate Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) soil maps and National Elevation Dataset (NED) topography for Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.  Integrating the digital soils and topography data enables the mapping of carbon in the landscape following previously developed methods (Gessler et al. 1995; 2000) and offers opportunities to advance this work using the latest spatial statistical methods.  Due to the scale of the data (10-meter resolution) and the geographic extent of the study area (approximately 100,000 km²), there are important elements of "Big Data" (large volume of source data potentially requiring high-performance computing assets to process) and data intensive science requiring development.  Funded in part through Award #2011-68002-30191 from the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture.