Integrating Spatial Education Experiences in West Virginia: Interpreting Conventional Soil Maps for Teaching and Learning Soil Science.

Conventional soil maps for the US, such as the Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database, provide a local to regional soil inventory with defined polygons with consistent soil properties that respond uniformly to land management practices. However, soil-landscape knowledge that is inherently embedded within soil survey maps can be extracted in support of teaching and learning soil science. West Virginia University (WVU) and the USDA-NRCS National Soil Survey Center-Geospatial Research Unit (GRU) are collaborating with Purdue University to expand the Integrating Spatial Educational Experiences (Isee) instructional approach to broaden the geographic extent of Isee. The goal of our efforts is to encourage teachers and students to experience how maps provide a valuable spatial context necessary to understand soil landscapes and, in a broader perspective, soil science. The objectives of this project are to develop students’ ability to use maps (i) to understand how and why soils and landscapes vary spatially at multiple scales ranging from individual fields, to counties, states, and, ultimately, globally; and (ii) to understand how the spatial distribution of soils and landscapes impacts the distributions of crops, cropping systems, land use, and environmental and natural resource issues across various scales. Digital maps for West Virginia were created using the SSURGO database. The spatial and tabular data in SSURGO were translated into soil property maps convenient for communicating soil landscape patterns and scientific data.