Towards Developing a Soil Property Visualization Tool to Support the NRCS Soil Data Join Re-Correlation Effort.

Soil surveys have been conducted on a county-by-county manner in the United States for more than 100 years. These soil surveys were designed to be applied for local land planning and management, but soil survey information is now often being used on larger scales. Use of soil survey information at such scales highlights discrepancies between soil map unit lines and interpretations related to survey age and differences in technical and scientific knowledge between surveys. Such discrepancies are being addressed with the soil data join re-correlation effort (SDJR). The SDJR effort focuses on "harmonizing" soil map unit attributes within each MLRA, identifies future workloads, and will bring map units to a common standard to minimize the influence of political boundaries. Current harmonization work is performed by comparing tabular reports from data contained in the National Soil Information System (NASIS), a difficult, tedious and potential error prone task. A soil property visualization tool that allowed rapid visualization of soil property differences between map units and map unit components would be useful. We present results from our initial investigation towards developing a soil property visualization tool and illustrate potential uses in simplifying the SDJR effort for a soil map unit component in MLRA 28A (Greater Salt Lake Area).