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 The
Spokane County Soil Survey
“
A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” Franklin
Roosevelt
Soil,
the living skin of the earth, impacts everything we do in
our world. It is among the most basic and valuable of all the
natural
resources found in the world. Soil produces the food that
we eat, provides a foundation for our structures, supports
life
to all earthly ecosystems and filters our wastes. Since the
devastating days of the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s, the
Soil Conservation Act of 1935 made the care of soil a priority
of Conservation Districts. The
first step in taking proper care of the soil is to promote
an understanding and awareness
of its importance, uniqueness
and fragility. To accomplish this there needs to be a basic
inventory of the different soils and how they exist in relation
to climate
and plants. Consequently each county performs a Soil
Survey to inventory the more than 23,000 soil series that occur in
various
combinations with different slopes and surface textures in
the U.S.
The
Spokane County Soil Survey team undertook
in 1998 the tremendous task of sampling, mapping and inventorying
all
the soils in
Spokane County in order to produce a new updated Soil Survey
report.
The project will take through 2007 and into 2008 to complete.
The need for
a new soil survey in Spokane County has been documented
by the
many
requests for the out-of-date 1968 manuscript. The 1968
manuscript is no longer in print and copies are not available.
This
update is seen as very necessary due to:
- 60 or more requests
per month for soil survey information
- Existing soils
data is out of date
- Old soil survey focused on agricultural
interpretations
- Photo base is out of date (1950)
- Increasing need for new updated
soil data
- Old soil survey databases are not
certified
- Existing soil map unit descriptions do not
address home site/urban development
The new updated version will
be available on an interactive CD ROM. This will make
soil data much more accessible
to users at
a substantially lower cost. Spokane County will
be one of the first West Coast counties to offer Soil
Survey information in this form.
We welcome input
from users regarding specific needs. Please send all
comments and questions to scott.bare@wa.usda.gov,
Soil Survey MLRA Project Leader.
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