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INTEGRATING DETAILED SOIL SURVEY AND LANDTYPE MAPPING FOR WATERSHED SCALE ASSESSMENTS IN THE WESTERN OREGON CASCADE MOUNTAINS
Citation:
Kern, J. S., M G. Johnson, D. Shank, AND R B. McKane. INTEGRATING DETAILED SOIL SURVEY AND LANDTYPE MAPPING FOR WATERSHED SCALE ASSESSMENTS IN THE WESTERN OREGON CASCADE MOUNTAINS. Presented at Soil Science Society of America annual meeting, Denver, CO, November 2-6, 2003.
Description:
Although the Western Oregon Cascades is one of the most intensely managed and economically important forest regions in North America, a lack of detailed soil information has hindered watershed-scale assessments of forest productivity, water supply, sensitive wildlife species, and recreation. Our objective is to develop broadly applicable soil mapping methods for this region to produce accurate spatial datasets of soil properties at the scale of stands to watersheds. The study area is the upper South Santiam River Basin, a topographically complex 50,000 ha area in the Willamette National Forest at 300 to 1,700 meters elevation. We developed a method for integrating detailed county-level soil survey data with US Forest Service Soil Resource Inventory landtype maps which is nontrivial because the two systems are incompatible. We conducted field work to characterize catenas of soils in each landtype unit. With information from lab analyses, published reports/theses, we classified the soil components and summarized their texture, rocks, depth, bulk density, organic C, and N. Geographic information system (GIS) analyses were used to subdivide landtype mapping into different soil components. County-level soil survey units were then correlated with landtypes and vice-versa to produce whole watershed mapping of each. The methodology is applicable to much of Western Oregon.