Binational Digital Soils Map of the Ambos Nogales Watershed, Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico

A digital map of soil parameters for the international Ambos Nogales watershed
was prepared to use as input for selected soils-erosion models. The Ambos
Nogales watershed in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, contains the
Nogales wash, a tributary of the Upper Santa Cruz River. The watershed covers
an area of 235 km squared just under half of which is in Mexico. Preliminary
investigations of potential erosion revealed a discrepancy in soils data and
mapping across the United States-Mexican border due to issues including
different mapping resolutions, incompatible formatting, and varying
nomenclature and classification systems. To prepare a digital soils map
appropriate for input to a soils-erosion model, the historical analog soils
maps for Nogales, Ariz., were scanned and merged with the larger-scale digital
soils data available for Nogales, Sonora, Mexico using a geographic information
system.

[Summary provided by the USGS.]