Soil Research Guide

This web page represents a joint effort by the Montana Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Natural Resource Information System of the Montana State Library. Its purpose is to provide access to the available SSURGO soils data for Montana. Spatial data is provided in UTM and State Plane Coordinates. Use of the attribute data requires Microsoft ©Access.

A soil survey browser from the UC Davis Soil Resource Laboratory. You can also download a Google Earth interface here: http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/soilweb/

A series of maps showing most recent day, monthly and 12 months calculated soil moisture, anomalies and percentiles; 25-year average soil moisture & soil wetness that are used in the soil moisture outlook.

The WRB was originally an initiative of FAO and UNESCO, supported by UNEP and the International Society of Soil Science which dates back to 1980. The intention of the project was to work towards the establishment of a framework through which ongoing soil classification could be harmonized. The final objective was to reach international agreement on the major soil groups to be recognized at a global scale as well as on the criteria and methodology to be applied for defining and separating them.

The mission of the World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue (WOSSAC) is to provide a secure home for soil survey reports, maps, imagery and photographs produced by British companies and surveyors overseas over the last 80 years from some 250 territories worldwide, with a view to ensuring their enduring availability and protection.

In many countries, soil maps are being lost because of lack of proper attention to storage and retrieval, often compounded by a loss of institutions that have been responsible for the acquisition and maintenance of soil and land resources data. This problem is acute in developing and transitional countries where valuable data, currently only available on paper, must be digitized before they are lost forever. The immediate objective is to transfer soil information into digital format.