Soil WikiProject

This year I have been participating with the Soil WikiProject. Working with a small group of Wikipedians interested in the earth sciences has been a fulfilling learning experience. The first order of business was to organize a comfortable directory structure on which to hang soil-related articles. I especially like the common sense way agricultural soil science and environmental soil science are treated as branches of edaphology, separating edaphic subjects from the pedology articles. It works particularly well in Wikipedia, where various aspects of soil science are informally laid claim to by other subject categories. For example, pedology has a prominent place in the physical geography directory structure : before the project the whole of soil science was treated as a derivative science of geography (and agronomy and geology and so forth).

From the above, you may think the articles are being rewritten strictly from a soil science point of view. They are not - the directory structure is intended to group similar subjects, not to narrow the perspective. The importance of an open perspective in Wikipedia is among the more difficult aspects for scientists to process when they begin editing. In my opinion, this is why most scientists seem drawn to contributing narrow subject matter. That's a fine place to start, but the more general subject matter is where the traffic is, where the effort is most appreciated, and where the collaborative wiki process works most efficiently. I'll expand on why this is important to soil scientists in future posts.

The project has about 400 soil-related articles to work on. Another 50-plus article subjects have been identified as needed, mostly involving pedology. The effort could use another pedologist or two. A good place for U.S. soil scientists to start is to check out the list of state soils. If your state is like most, that article remains to be written

With so many articles, part of the effort has been to concentrate on a short list of articles most important to the project. Along these lines, the soil article recently came through an extensive article improvement campaign. The article had the benefit of editorial review after it was proposed as a featured article. While it did not achieve this status, it certainly accorded itself well. This bodes well for future improvements in soil-related articles at Wikipedia.

Tech Tags: soil science wikipedia

Come a Cropper

Gary Jones' posts over at Muck and Mystery never fail to get me thinking how the land works. Like this post where he promotes pasture over cropland. Which made me think back to an article at wikipedia about the paleopedological record that had wow-ed me recently:

Mollisols, the major agricultural soils of the present, are unique in their geological youth, being known from the Eocene but common only from the Miocene, as grasslands evolved.

"As grasslands evolved". Think about it. Can you see the Miocene era fire pushing back the forest and grass/soil biotic community evolving to extend their advantage? The evolution of grazing and grazers that followed? The soils darkening and levels of soil biologial activity ramping up?

Soils look so different in the forests versus in the grassland. Mollisols are awesome soils, and grazing is a natural component in their formation.

Older than Dirt

Bill Gurstelle over at The Technology Underground Blog states that, having turned 50 years old today, he realizes that he is easily older than dirt. And does a fair job of proving it out, quoting John Adams on compost, posting a swell picture of compost (hmmmm. dirt.) and pointing out that compost produces fresh dirt in less time than it takes to live to be 50. I'm down with that. Happy birthday to you Bill.

Tech Tags: dirt birthday

Public Access to Public Data

In a development that has far reaching implications for public access to publicly funded geodata, the Guardian reported last Thursday that Tim Berners-Lee has made a speech to an Oxford University audience in which he challenged the British government to make Ordinance Survey mapping data available at no cost for Web use and

may get his wish later this year. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told an Oxford University audience last week getting "basic, raw data from Ordnance Survey" online would help build the "semantic web", which he defines as a web of data using standard formats so that relevant data can be found and processed by computers.

Berners-Lee said it may be reasonable for OS, the premier state-owned supplier of public sector information, to continue to charge for its high-resolution mapping. But even if licences were required, he added, OS should make its data open to manipulation. "I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data," he said. "I want to be able to do Google Maps things to a ridiculous extent, and not limited in the way that Google Maps is."

The guest lecturer said he had discussed this with OS. "They are certainly thinking about this and studying what they can do. OS is in favour of doing the right thing for the country, as well as maintaining its existence, so I think there's a fair chance we'll find mutual agreement."

This relates to a similarly controversial subject in my State and anywhere else in the United States where individual datasets for current county coverage can cost the purchaser thousands of dollars and be encumbered with copyright restrictions and in proprietary MrSID or ESRI formats. As someone else said:

In the United States there seem to be two contradictory trends in public access to public data. On the one hand, more public data than ever before is being published on the Internet for free download. On the other hand, many public agencies ignore laws guaranteeing public access to public data, or they are providing the data in a form that renders it unusable by the public.

Roger Longhorn, Info-Dynamics Research Associates Ltd points out that

It is important to remember that, in the USA, free (no cost) access to geodata applies only to federally collected (or paid for) data. State and local government, holders of vast quantities of geodata, can (and some do) charge for access and/or exploitation of these important, typically large scale, geodata resources.

Local governments charge fees at levels that discourage innovation, throttle data dissemination, skew distribution and discourage data reuse. I don't mind paying a reasonable fee and I truly don't mind local governments recouping reasonable cost. Hundreds of dollars and in some cases, thousands of dollars, per data set is not reasonable. Consider that these same agencies and districts would have to provide this data at the cost of copying it to CD's if requested under their freedom of information requirements. The difference in charges is for timely delivery and the substantial benefits that derive from being a team player.

Yet it is unseemly for us in the United States to complain. Our nation's history supports the basic premise that "one of the reasons to have a government is to have good map data" available to the public. Post-9/11 security concerns have clouded the issue but (as analyzed in this pdf)have not changed the fundamentals.

Rapid developments in the UK and UE will encourage those in the USA working to make publicly funded data more freely available, and less encumbered with restrictive copyrights and proprietary formats. What goes around, comes around.

Complementing open geodata efforts is the open source geospatial technologies movement. The newly formed Open Source Geospatial Foundation (discussed here, here and here) will develop the standards needed for open source to advance. I hope both movements, open source and open data, do well. On both sides of the Atlantic.

Tech Tags: open access data news

Missoula Soil Science Consultant Speaks

Tell someone you are a soil scientist and it invariably requires an explanation of what you do. It's interesting that few of us do the same things and the telling of it reveals much about the person as well as the community they serve. For that reason I like to collect other folks' descriptions of their work. Certainly the telling of Barry Dutton's life work stands among my favorites because he built his business from scratch in a particularly cost-conscious region. He did it largely without the benefit of the 2 main drivers of regional soil consulting booms: booming suburban sprawl and booming energy prices driving increased well drilling and surface mining for coal and oil shale. I've heard several iterations of Barry's telling over the years and look forward to future installments.

Barry Dutton consults out of Missoula, Montana for PBS&J which purchased his company last year. Barry addressed the June 14, 2004 National Cooperative Soil Survey Western Regional Conference in Jackson, Wyoming (pdf source):

I was asked to review what private soil scientists are up to these days and will use my own company to illustrate. I started Land and Water Consulting Inc. 25 years ago and now have 50 employees and five offices. Our staff includes soil scientists, hydrologists, botanists, wetland scientists, biologists, water rights specialists, engineers, surveyors, GIS specialists, technicians and support staff. Our wetland projects this year include wetland delineation on over 10,000 acres. We will restore over 60 wetlands impacted by ski area and golf course development. We will design several dozen wetland mitigation projects and will monitor over 100 wetland projects constructed as mitigation for highway project impacts.

Our vegetation projects this year include several thousand acres of vegetation mapping for EIS studies, vegetation management plans for ski areas, and vegetation TES inventories for project sites. We will also conduct weed and riparian area inventories on private, state, and federal lands.

Our streambank and shoreline projects include restoration along hundred of miles of streams and lakes. We are working on removing a 100 year old dam on a large river within the largest superfund site in the country. This work includes channel design, wetland rehabilitation and riparian area enhancement. We will also conduct watershed analyses and implement TMDLs (Total Maximum Daily Loads) for dozens of streams.

I do a lot of expert witness work and soil survey often has a role in the cases. My oldest case has been going on for over 30 years and the focus is the definition of Peat. The 1911 Soil Survey got it right in describing the site as “high organic content silt loam.” However, the 1959 soil survey called the site peat. The owner sold the “peat” and has been arguing over the definition of peat ever since with the peat miner who purchased it. In another expert witness case, a friendly NRCS soil scientist tried to do a county planner and a developer a favor and produce a wetland map. Unfortunately this person had insufficient training in wetland delineation. The developer filled up to the wetland line and built a parking area before the ---- hit the fan. He spent $250,000 on lawyers, experts, fines and restoration activities to correct his mistakes and is now considering sending NRCS the bill. I am also involved each year in a half-dozen wet basement lawsuits and in almost every case there is a soil survey covering the site that predicted the problem if anyone had known or taken the time to look.

We are also involved in numerous reclamation projects for mine sites, pipelines and other projects. If you want to evaluate soil survey accuracy there is nothing like a 300 milelong pipeline trench across the landscape.

Likely because a longer litany wouldn't add any value, Barry didn't mention several other areas: his extensive work with water use efficiency for irrigation districts, his work instructing health district personnel on soil features relevant to septic systems and his work mapping soils but using project specific approaches that describing would only have distracted NCSS audience from his core message:

The decline of the soil survey program is leading the decline of the soil survey profession.

This is a powerful statement to lay on NCSS, the keepers of the national soil survey program. I plan on discussing it further.

Barry Dutton's message is also at the core of the brand of concern for soil science survival that I was dismissive of at the end of my previous post, a position based on observing the ever increasing demand for consulting soil scientists. Speak with Barry, as I did this afternoon, and you will find his concern is not waning despite his considerable business success and despite the high demand for his individual services. I am reevaluating my position and will present it in a future post. Certainly we soil scientists have the work but without academe, without soil survey sufficient to maintain our critical mass, won't what we do continue to be parceled out among the other disciplines? Any comments on this issue would be most appreciated.

Tech Tags: soil science consulting pedology