• Basic Information
• Additional Info

Basic Information

• Project No. and Title: NCERA_old3 : Soil and Landscape Assessment, Function and Interpretation
• Period Covered: 10/01/2017 to 09/30/2018
• Date of Report: 01/07/2019
• Annual Meeting Dates: 10/04/2018 to 10/04/2018

Participants

Darrell Schulze, Purdue Univ., Brian Slater, Ohio State Univ., Nic Jelinski, Univ. Minnesota, Kevin McSweeney, Univ. Illinois. Judith Turk, Univ. Nebraska and Mickey Ransom, Univ. Kansas were connected on-line to the meeting via Googledocs.

Accomplishments

Impacts

1. 1. NCERA university cooperators continue to provide a significant role in coordination and planning of ongoing soil survey activities, mainly directed towards improvement and updates of accessible soil survey information in National data bases. The focus is on properties important for land use and management decisions.
2. 2. University, NRCS and other cooperating agencies are working together in a number of states to develop better understanding of specific soil-landscape relationships to improve and update soil surveys. These projects include efforts to characterize benchmark soils and catenas, contributions to research on nutrient loading and development of calibrated P-indices, and Digital Soil Mapping.
3. 3. In a major education-focused project, state wide maps of a variety of soil features such as soil parent materials have been produced for a number of states in the east of the region and integrated into an online and tablet system for field use by students and others.
4. 4. Projects in all states aim to continue to improve the science behind soil assessment and interpretations. Continuing projects include new developments in Digital Soil Mapping, methods for more rapid and accurate soil attribute prediction, effects of land use and management on soil carbon stocks, evaluation of soil moisture sensors for monitoring hydrology and controlling wastewater application within onsite systems, effects of soil amendments on soil health, tillage impacts on soil properties such as soil compaction and on crop yields and product quality.
5. 5. NCERA-3 members and universities continue to provide quality educational programs at undergraduate level. Each state reported noteworthy research, exceptional teaching of pedology and related areas including soil judging and meaningful outreach programs. Example successes include many refereed publications (see list below), thousands of student credit hours in soil science extension publication related to pedology. In addition, members provided a wide range of services to new stakeholders and clients locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
6. 6. NCERA-3 members continue to work with a broad range of other disciplines to enhance access to high quality information about the soil resource, and to help the public understand the value of the soil resource and to avail the valuable tools for aiding responsible decisions about natural resource management. Notably, colleagues engaged in regional crop, forest, rangeland and climate modeling are consistent users of soil survey information and engage in discussion with our members about access, use and interpretation of soil survey information.

Publications