| | The development of the Agricultural Region of Alberta Soil Inventory Database (AGRASID) – the comprehensive soils database for Alberta’s entire agricultural area – is enabling such diverse applications as targeting extension programs and modelling appropriate land management. Another enhancement now on the horizon will give users an even better look at the data.
Tony Brierley, a soil scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), has been involved with AGRASID’s development since its inception in 1992. At that time, with funding under a federal-provincial sustainable agriculture program, people from AAFC, the Alberta Research Council and numerous private consultants collaborated to create the database.
“We had been told to create a digital, seamless, 1:100,000 scale database for the agricultural region of Alberta. So we knew what we had to do, but how were we going to do it?” says Brierley. “The biggest hurdle was to design the database structure in order to digitize and standardize all the hard-copy soil maps. The vintage of the maps ranges from the 1930s right through to 1990. We had a lot of different map scales, map symbolization and mapping concepts to convert into one consistent format, so you could go from one county to the next and have the lines all match, the concepts all flow, and descriptions be the same.”
This painstaking work included transferring detailed information from the maps, as well as interpreting air photos and field checking to update the early maps. “It was a major task,” notes Brierley. “There were close to 50 people involved in one way or another in the project from 1993 to 1998.”
The first version of AGRASID, released in 1998, was available on CD. Between 1998 and 2001, AAFC and Alberta Agriculture staff worked with some consultants to make modifications to the database, resulting in easier and faster manipulation of the soil landscape information, and in distributing AGRASID on the Internet.
More recently, the developers have created a specialized viewer, which they hope to have available on the Internet soon. Without this viewer, AGRASID simply lists the type of landscape in each polygon and the proportion of the landscape occupied by each soil type in the polygon. The viewer enhances this, Brierley explains. “For instance, we’ve said eroded soils generally occur on the knolls, Chernozems usually on the upper and mid slopes, Solonetz soils on the lower slopes, and poorly drained soils in the depressions, and we’ve represented this distribution on a 2-D image of the landscape. Also we have included some pictures of the more extensive types of landscapes. So we are helping users to visualize what they would find in each polygon. We are also including colour air photographs with the soil lines superimposed on them.”
Policy planners are using AGRASID in conjunction with other databases to investigate a wide variety of issues. “If you give us criteria based on attributes in the database, we can theme the data on those attributes,” notes Brierley. “For example, we were involved in deriving a series of themed maps and overlaying those themed maps with additional sources of information to determine focus areas of high priority for conducting Environmental Farm Plan workshops.”
To access AGRASID, go to www.agric.gov.ab.ca and search for “Alberta Soil Information Centre”. You can also order hard-copy soil maps and reports from the Centre. |
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