How are the soil surveys of today different from those completed 100 years ago?
Today’s soil surveys identify many more soil properties, utilize digital imagery for overlaying with other data, and are more detailed than earlier surveys. Early soil surveys identified very few soil properties, such as texture, color, depth, and wetness. Todays surveys identify over 300 soil properties. Instead of publishing on hand-drawn maps, surveys now use aerial photo background imagery with digitized soil lines that can be used with other data layers in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Map scale has changed from 1 inch to the mile (1:62,000 scale) to about 2.5 to 5 inches per mile (1:24,000 or 1:12,000 scale). Early surveys focused on farming, whereas surveys of today provide information for a variety of land uses in addition to agriculture.
