Digital Soil Survey of Woodruff County, Arkansas

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This digital soil survey prototype for Woodruff County, Arkansas was developed in 1998 in cooperation with and supported by the Arkansas Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Our contacts at NRCS were Charles Fultz and Rick Fielder

This project was a first attempt at making soils surveys available via the Web. It aimed primarily at illustrating how the PDF format could be used to create interactive maps in a low cost and easily accessible electronic format.

NRCS has now implemented, the Web Soil Survey, a system that provides web access to most of its digital soils information.

Table of Contents of the Woodruff County Soils Book
(click on the section you would like to view)

How this survey was made (PDF)

Soil properties (PDF)

Formation of the soils (PDF)

How it was created

The Digital Soil Survey of Woodruff County is based on the "Soil Survey of Woodruff County, Arkansas", a manuscript put together by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The survey includes map sheets showing labeled soils map units and look-up tables with the soil map unit descriptions.
The primary goal of this project consisted in providing Web-accessible clickable soil survey sheets. The original printed maps contain a lot of details and are difficult to use when printed on standard office paper. Therefore, to maximize map readibility digital quarter quads were created.

Creation of quarter quad maps using GRASS 4.0

The GRASS 4.0 ps.map command was used to generate each quarter quad. A Bourne shell script was created to iterate through the list of 57 quarter quads(QQ). For each QQ, the script would set up the map region, title and sheet number and then run ps.map to build the corresponding soil map sheet in Postscript format. These files were then converted to PDF using the Acrobat Exchange software.

Creation of the index map

The index map is a GIF image generated using GRASS 4.0. Within the HTML file, each quarter quad area is delimited using the coordinates of a bounding box which is then associated to a HTML hyperlink pointing to the corresponding quarter quad sheet.

Bulk labeling of each PDF quarter quad using the Infodata Compose software

Each of the 57 quarter quad sheets contains more than a hundred labeled soil map units. To attach a web hyperlink to each label, one needs a software that can identify specific labels in the PDF file and associate each one with the corresponding hyperlink. The Compose software requires a file listing each label and its corresponding hyperlink. Using this information it parses a PDF file and inserts the HTML hyperlinks. The Batch Meister available as part of Compose allowed us to process all quarter quads in one step.

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