Soil Landscapes of the United States – Mapping Soil Parent Material Terms for Educators.

Reliable and readily accessible soil geographic information is critical for the estimation of many ecosystem services. For example, the ability of the soil to store precipitation and release water to plants can diminish or amplify the impact of agricultural drought events. Such assessments of ecosystem services, analysis and modeling are being conducted over large regions the United States, North America, and the Globe.  These assessments require complete, consistent, correct, and comprehensive soils information.  Soil parent material kinds and origins when mapped in the landscape have been found to be a very effective educational tool to teach how soils influence ecosystem services. The National Cooperative Soil Survey is currently reevaluating legacy soil geographic databases and investing in new digital soil mapping methods and products to better estimate soil ecosystem services. In this study, legacy soil parent material kinds and origin were queried and mapped for the Conterminous United States using 2014 gridded soil survey geographic database (gSSURGO -10m resolution) with the intent of providing a map layer that is suitable to teaching college students about soil landscapes at various Google cache resolutions.  This effort was found to benefit from a scalable hierarchy of parent material terms linking existing and new soil geographic knowledge. Soil Landscapes of the United States (SOLUS) is envisioned as a national, scalable system of organizing digital soil geographic knowledge by partitioning soil parent material and soil climate variation into broad regions. Each region is further partitioned by nested, smaller regions sharing patterns of soil forming factors in space and time.  Methods for extracting soil parent material kind and origin from gSSURGO and the Official Soil Series record are presented along with resulting SOLUS-Parent Material map layer and legend draft and review strategy.