Gridded Soil Survey Geographic Database (gSSURGO) – a New Raster Soil Map Layer From USDA.

The popular Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) Database is available in the Web Soil Survey, but not easily used in national, regional and statewide resource planning and analysis of soils data. USDA-NRCS has added a new product designed to provide convenient access to soils information for large land areas by the simulation modeling community.  The new product, called gSSURGO (g for gridded), provides detailed soil survey mapping in raster format including all traditional attributes plus “ready to map” attributes organized in statewide tiles for desktop GIS.  In addition, the raster format allows GIS visualization of highly detailed soils themes for an entire state in a matter of seconds.  The gSSURGO Database is derived from the official Soil Survey Geographic Database for  fiscal year 2013 and was prepared by merging the traditional vector-based SSURGO digital map data and tabular data into statewide extents, adding a statewide gridded map layer derived from the vector layer, and adding a new value-added look up (valu) table database.  The gSSURGO database is provided in an Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI^®) file geodatabase format that relates all attribute tables together to make soil queries straight forward for the user for attributes such as prime farmland, land capability class, surface pH, or depth to root restriction.  The new “Ready to Map” themes in the valu1 table contain data such as (but not limited to) soil organic carbon; available water storage; National Commodity Crop Productivity Index; root-zone depth of commodity crops; available water storage within the root-zone depth; drought-vulnerable soil landscapes; and potential wetland soil landscapes. For detailed descriptions and how to obtain datasets, go to the gSSURGO website at: http://soils.usda.gov/survey/geography/ssurgo/description_gssurgo.html. The Gridded Soil Survey Geographic Database (gSSURGO) is available on the Geospatial Data Gateway for download or order placement at: http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/.