ArcSIE News, October 20, 2011

Map Products of "The First ArcSIE Project" is SSURGO Certified

The spatial and tabular data for the Initial Soil Survey of Essex County (Vermont, US) is SSURGO certified, and has been published to the web (Soil Data Mart and Web Soil Survey). This is the first county-level soil mapping project in which ArcSIE played a major role.

According to Bob Long, the MLRA Soil Survey Office Leader who is in charge of this project, most of the spatial data in the final polygon-based map product originated as raster results from ArcSIE. Some of the raster results from ArcSIE represented individual soil series (basal till), and others represented map unit phases (bedrock controlled landforms and ablation till). In the end, all of the raster results were logically grouped and processed to achieve a 5-acre minimum size pixel cluster. This raster product was then automatically vectorized using the ArcSIE vectorization tool.

“The improvement in quality that we have achieved in Essex County over the last couple of years is very apparent to all, and has been formally acknowledged by regional Quality Assurance personnel”, Bob said.