Enhancing the National Cooperative Soil Survey.

State and federal soil survey activities in the United States began in 1896 with the Agricultural Appropriations Act. Most of the surveys were small-scale colored maps, and were general in nature or were single-purpose surveys like those made for conservation planning.  The “modern soil survey” era and the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) began in 1952, when the USDA’s Soil Conservation Service (now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service) was given responsibility for providing soil surveys for all non-federal lands.  These were more sophisticated surveys prepared usually by county on a photographic base as opposed to color maps and drawings.  Thousands of hard copy soil surveys were published and distributed from 1952 until mid-1990’s when the digital soil survey era began.  It is currently estimated that NRCS has soil maps and data available digitally (online) for more than 95 percent of the nation’s counties and anticipates having 100 percent in the near future. This information is available at the county, state, regional and national level using the National Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO), also known as Web Soil Survey, and The Digital General Soil Map of the United States, STATSGO (now STATSGO2).  Great progress has been made since 1896 in the collection, correlation and compilation of map data, tabular data, and interpretive data. The question now is how do we build on the foundational work of our predecessors to enhance the NCSS?