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Using SSURGO data

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06-30-2021 10:05 AM
Hope-Hauptman
Occasional Contributor

I want to data for the soil hydrologic class for the Central Valley in California. Although I can see what I want in the living atlas: Portal -> Living Atlas -> USGS SSURGO -> Soil hydrologic Group, I cannot seem to figure out how to download and assemble that layer in ArcGIS pro as a shapefile or raster data? There seem to be two main ways of accessing SSURGO data.  I have tried both for one county just to see if I could get it to work but failed. Ultimately I would want this for 8 counties in the Central Valley...

Web soil survey

https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/WebSoilSurvey.aspx

SSURGO Downloader

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=cdc49bd63ea54dd2977f3f2853e07fff

 

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11 Replies
MAmlin
by
New Contributor

I just recently went thru something similar and reached out to NRCS about how to best export the soil types I need. I uploaded my shapefile AOI (area of interest) to the Web Soil Survey (that you linked above) and exported the soil geometry and all associated tables. I then added the shapefile to my Pro project and joined to the tables I needed. Tables come in an access database and the readme includes instructions on how to prep the access db, then find the table you need and import to pro and join to shapefile.

Or you can try using this NRCS custom toolbox within Pro to extract the data you need - worked pretty well and a bit simpler than using the access db: https://github.com/ncss-tech/SSURGO-On-Demand-Pro-table

Here's an excerpt from the email from NRCS explaining the toolbox and info about an additional python tool (my python knowledge is not advanced enough so I didn't try that):

"If you indeed are after soil properties and interpretations, you can use the SSURGO On-Demand ArcGIS Pro – toolbox found at this link.  To use these tools, use the SAPOLYGON (soil survey area polygons) to grab soil properties and interpretations via Soil Data Access for all map units in the selected soil survey areas.  Currently, this tool will only return the results as a table and you will have to join to your polygon or raster layer by mukey manually.

If you are brave, there is a pure python solution, pysda, found at this link.  This tool leverages pandas/geopandas.  It’s a solution that is very much under development and hasn’t had much real world testing, so feel free to give it a spin if it sounds interesting to you.  Check out the python notebooks for examples."

Hope that helps!

Alena
by
New Contributor III

The most current SSURGO data is available at Web Soil Survey. The data can be downloaded by Area of Interest (AOI) or by county. SSURGO data is also available for download as file geodatabases in CONUS or by State. The file geodatabases are created after Web Soil Survey updates in October of every year. There is gSSURGO and gNATSGO. The file geodatabases contain raster, feature classes, and attribute tables. Join the MUAGGATT table by MUKEY for the hydrologic group.

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