The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program

- ASRIS, SoilMapp, National Soil Archive, Data Standards

LAND AND WATER /SOIL AND LANDSCAPE SCIENCE

David Jacquier

7 June 2013

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Background

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier2 |

Soil Survey in Australia

• States and territories are responsible for the soil survey coverage

• Coverage is not complete, is mostly broad scale, and varies in quality

• Considerable experimentation with new methods (e.g. airborne gamma-ray spectroscopy, DEMs, climate surfaces) to fill data gaps

• The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program (ACLEP) is developing standards and better methods for acquiring and using soil information

• The National Committee on Soil and Terrain (NCST) is the steering committee for ACLEP. The NCST is comprised of membership from the state and territory agencies responsible for soil survey and from federal agencies in related fields

Data Standards

3 |

ACLEP publishes handbooks and guidelines for soil survey practitioners

� Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook

� Guidelines for Surveying Soil and Land Resources

� The Australian Soil Classification

� Soil Physical Measurement and Interpretation for Land Evaluation

These publications provide guidance on undertaking surveys, recommended analytical techniques and are the vocabularies for data storage applications.

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

Australian Soil Resource Information System

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ASRIS is an online geographic information system and it:

• Provides access to the best available soil and land resource information across Australia

• Combines the best of qualitative mapping with new quantitative information

• Integrates soil and land information from many sources

• Opens many new possibilities for monitoring and forecasting the condition of Australia’s soils and landscapes

• Focuses on providing estimates of functional soil attributes (e.g. soil pH, electrical conductivity, available water capacity) and uses soil classification as a means of communication

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier5 |

6 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

The ASRIS data model (1)

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The key elements:

• A spatial hierarchy of land units with seven levels of generalization

– The upper three levels provide general descriptions of soils and landscapes across the continent.

– Lower levels provide detailed information for regions where mapping is complete

• A consistent set of soil attributes (e.g. soil depth, permeability, water storage)

• Soil attributes are presented for idealised soil profiles that have five contiguous soil horizons

• A soil profile database of fully characterised sites that are representative of significant areas and environments

• Estimates of uncertainty for soil attributes to encourage formal analysis of the uncertainty of predictions generated

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

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Level and tract name

Mapping window

Main attributes used for mapping

Typical uses for the information

Level 1 Division

30 km Broad physiography (slope and relief)

Broad geographic context

Level 2 Province

10 km Water balance, physiography

National natural resource policy

Level 3 Zone

3 km Substrate lithology, water balance, physiography

Regional natural resource policy

Level 4District

1 km Groupings of geomorphically related systems

Catchment planning, location of new industries

Level 5System

300 m Local climate, relief, slope, lithology, drainage network, soil profile class

Catchment management, hydrological modelling, land conservation, infrastructure planning

Level 6Facet

30 m Slope, aspect, land curvature, soil profile class

Farm management, land-use planning, on-ground works

Level 7Site

10 m Soil properties, surface condition, microrelief

Precision agriculture, site development

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

The ASRIS data model (2)

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• The ASRIS five layer model

• Each idealized soil profile is represented by five contiguous soil layers. The layers are intended to discriminate materials in terms of their functional behaviour.

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

ASRIS attribution

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A consistent set of land qualities or attributes is described for land-unit tracts at levels 3-6 . The attributes relate to the intrinsic capability of land to support various land uses and include:

• Landform – landform pattern, landform element, rock outcrop, drainage

• Chemical properties – pH, organic carbon, EC, exch bases, ESP, CEC

• Physical properties - bulk density, clay content, coarse fragment

• Hydraulic properties – hydraulic conductivity, PAWC

• Australian Soil Classification

Descriptions from the lowest level units feed into summaries at higher levels. These are displayed in the online maps as area-weighted means.

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

June 6th 2013

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Level 3 Level 4 Level 5

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

12 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

13 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

Contextual Datasets•Topographic attributes•Topographic maps•Land use•Land cover•Climate•Radiometrics

14 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

SoilMapp

SoilMapp for iPad enables you to:

• Identify commonly needed soil information for environmental modelling (i.e. carbon accounting, food security, species distribution)

• learn about the likely soil types on your property

• view maps, photographs, satellite images, tables and graphs of data about nearby soils

• uncover your soil’s physical and chemical characteristics, including acidity (pH), soil carbon, available water storage, salinity and erodibility

• get soil information to put into the farm computer model APSIM, a model that can help with management decisions on crops and project likely crop yields

• access the app anywhere there is wireless or internet connection to your iPad.

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier15 |

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier16 |

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier17 |

National Soil Grids

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Standard data products for environmental modelling• Identify commonly needed soil information for environmental modelling

(i.e. carbon accounting, food security, species distribution)

• Use the best available soil information

• First products: Clay content 0-30cm, Bulk Density 0-30cm, Plant available water capacity 0-1m, pH 0-30cm, Australian Soil Classification

Challenges• The data contains between 1-5 depth layers of varying thickness and some

layers may be missing

• Data comes from several data sources

• Flexible methodology to be able to deliver different depth slices (i.e. GlobalSoilMap.net 0-5, 5-15, 15-30, 30-60, 60-100, 100-200cm intervals)

Datasets available from ASRIS Themes http://www.asris.csiro.au/themes.html

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

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Conventional

Mapping

Grid/raster

90m cells

Rasterization

Soil profile data

-variable intervals

-missing data

Fit spline

Depth spline

function1 cm intervals

Standard

depth

mean

Standard depths

Attach to grid

Re-fit

spline

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

20 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

21 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier22 |

• Aspect

• MrVBF

• Plan and profile curvature

• Slope (percent and degrees)

• Median slope over 300 m radius circle

• Relief (elevation range) over 300 m and 1000 m radius circle

• Slope-relief classification

• Topographic position index

• Contributing area

• Topographic wetness index

• Cell area (varies with latitude due to geographic projection)

Terrain Derivatives

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier23 |

Slope

(%)

Relief

(300 m radius)

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier24 |

Data Format and Access

• Terrain derivatives are in ESRI grid format

• 1 second resolution datasets are available only as 1x1 degree tiles

• 3 second datasets are available as 1x1 degree tiles and as an Australia-wide mosaic in an ESRI file geodatabase

• 3 second datasets available via the Data Access Portal https://data.csiro.au/dap

CSIRO National Soil Archive

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Soil specimens

• 71,000 specimens housed in Canberra

• 9,500 sites across Australia

• Mainly collected for soil research

Soil Data

• Relational database contain site descriptions, soil morphology and soil chemistry

• Approximately 650,000 laboratory measurements

• Many sites have detailed chemistry, micromorphology, soil physics and/or mineralogy

The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

LAND AND WATER

Thank you