Using Web Soil Survey tools

This morning I sat down to see if I could learn to use the USDA's Web Soil Survey. The amount of data that is accessible is so large and site specific that using a whole state as an Area of Interest wasn't logical, so when defining my AOI I chose an area that I've been working in lately. The area I chose is along the James River in the Jefferson National Forest.

You can see that there are several units within this AOI that I've defined by a rectangle, and that there is a lot of data available on the kind of soil and slope that is within each unit area.

I wanted to try a  little bit of a bigger area so I defined my AOI by county, and I chose the county just based on where my original AOI was, which was Rockbridge County.

I split it up into two pictures here so you can see the entire option bar and data output that was generated. 

For Rockingham County I picked an option to look into from the option bar. I picked seedling mortality, and it assigned a rating for seedling mortality rate to each map unit. You can see that there are a lot of different suitability and limitation options that you can look into based on the soil data. 

Under the Properties and Qualities tab you can also look into factors like susceptibility to erosion 

For a beginner like me, a handy feature is the View Description button, which will open a box that tells you what the rating means. In this case, to put it very simply, the higher the rating for each unit the more that unit is susceptible to erosion

Whole overwhelming at first, the Web Soil Survey is an amazing tool that you can use for all types of applications, from planning your garden to planning large scale developed recreation projects and their impacts on the soil in your planning area. I used this tutorial to walk me through the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vszIhcghykk&feature=youtu.be&t=1m49s