Investigating the Potential of National Cooperative Soil Survey Information for Advancing Soil Science.

The National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) maintains a large database of soil information that has not been fully utilized by the soil science community. The potential of the NCSS database to explore fundamental research questions varies with the degree of data processing required to transfer the information to the format needed for a particular investigation.  Three research topics will be presented in increasing order of complexity in the required transformations of the currently available data. The goal of the first project was to utilize the NCSS database to investigate climatological controls on effective porosity (EP), defined as the difference between total porosity and water content at -33 kPa.  Data transformation was limited to removing the influence of texture on EP values to unmask their correlation with climatological variables, obtained from the US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and the Parameter-elevation Relationships on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM). The goal of the second project was to investigate potential patterns of soil structure (type, size and grade) distribution in relation to climate. This project required the transformation of visual data collected in the field to a set of quantitative variables and entailed the use of data not contained in the NCSS database. The last example involves generating data to quantify microstructure from the vast collection of thin sections archived at the NCSS. This project has not been realized, and it would require a significant investment to digitize thin sections and analyze the resulting images. However, the potential of this approach to the soils community will be illustrated with a small subset of images obtained by digitizing selected thin sections from the database.