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Kingston,Mi | Well it wasn't Army's of Soil Scientists more like a squad. Our county was soil surveyed by 2 federal and 1 state soil scientist plus administrative services from the Soil Conservation District over a 5 year period then a 2 or 3 year period of office work to match lines, transfer the soils boundary lines from 1963 air photos to 1981 air photos, eliminate duplicate descriptions or soils that were so minor in differences and extent that it made sense to fold them into nearly identical descriptions. After this work was complete, field work in 1985, office and printing by 1998 or so, our county was mapped completely using the current version of soils classes. It had been mapped earlier in the 1920's by a slightly larger crew and published in a smaller format.
My understanding is the final counties are now done (like forest land in Michigan's Upper Peninsula) and now they are part way thru a process of rationalizing or matching all the counties within a Major Land Resource Area (M.L.R.A.)to a comprehensive single survey. This effort has been in progress with M.L.R.A. offices with 2 or 3 soil scientists assigned to areas such as the area I worked in Southeast Michigan that cover 15 t0 20 counties of 300,000 to 600,000 acres each for about 10 years. When this completed, soil 1 will be the same in county A as in county Z within a M.L.R.A. In our M.L.R.A., we had counties with soil surveys completed in the 1950's using a slightly different set of soil family class names that had different parameters thru counties like my home county that was mapped 30 years later.
I studied soil science with the intent of becoming a mapper, I was asked to join the Army as anything but a mapper, when I came out of the Army, they had changed from the classification system I had learned to the current one. | |
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Where did soil survey maps come from?
