Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

All participants in the project are active contributors to the National Cooperative Soil Survey as participants on various national and regional committees, as contributors to soil survey activities in their respective states, and as educators training the next generation of soil scientists.

All of the individuals involved with this project are contributors to the Soil Explorer project and have created, or they are currently are creating, Dominant Soil Parent Material maps for their respective states. These maps are available to anyone anywhere via a web browser (SoilExplorer.net) or via apps for iOS and Android devices. Support for the parent material maps is provided by a project titled, Completion of the Isee Soils Database for the North Central Region, funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service ($100,000, 8/28/2017 – 8/27/2020). Currently, completed parent material maps are available for IN, OH, IA, MI, WI, KY, WV, MD, and TX, and draft maps are available for ND, SD, NE, KS, MN, and MO. We anticipate completing all the parent material maps during the 2020 calendar year. In addition, a new project titled, Leveraging Soil Explorer for Soils and Ecological Training, funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service ($52,295, 8/28/2019 – 8/31/2021), was awarded to Purdue University to expand the maps available on Soil Explorer. This project will “mine” the entire US Soil Survey database (the SSURGO database) to produce maps for the entire area covered by the US Cooperative Soil Survey, which includes the conterminous U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Pacific island territories.