Using Web Soil Survey- USDA

While listening to the tutorial and playing with the Web Soil Survey I was able to discover many helpful tools and capabilities of the map. You can tell this was created by someone who has used other platforms before and had very specific things they wanted to make sure it could do to make the users life easier. Having used several mapping platforms and natural resources based maps before, as well as trying to integrate other tools with each other this program is well thought out. Some of the properties I found most helpful from a basic user point of view:
  • link- very helpful if you are working on a project and want to be able to reopen the same extents
  • exporting to a different platform 
  • navigating map and extents is relatively easy with only a basic explanation necessary
Looking at this program from the point of view of someone who would use this for a study or in depth analysis the things I found interesting and helpful were:
  • description of soil types and delineations are clear and precise outlining percentages of soil types 
  • soil reports available at certain scales that cover data from erosion, vegetation, water features, and land classifications
Despite its many benefits I did find some short comings of the program based on my specific needs for this project. Most of the short comings are related to working on a smaller scale. The maps extents and scales were created to be used on a larger scale area like hundreds of acres of farmland. The area I am focusing on is a much smaller area that is primarily upland forest, low wetlands and shoreline. Much of these areas have complicated soil types and layers which should be analyzed on the ground with true soil samples. 
  • best at a scale of 1:1200 not ideal for smaller scale areas and focus
  • although they are generally accurate they are not good for very specific sites which are best determined by on site field work
  • outdated aerial imagery
    

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