State Soil Geographic (STATSGO) for Wyoming

This layer shows the U.S. General Soil Map of general soil association units by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. It was developed by the National Cooperative Soil Survey and supersedes the State Soil Geographic (STATSGO) dataset published in 1994. It consists of a broad-based inventory of soils and non-soil areas that occur in a repeatable pattern on the landscape and that can be cartographically shown at the scale mapped. The soil units are symbolized by Esri to show the dominant condition for the 12 soil orders according to Soil Taxonomy. Dominant condition was determined by evaluating each of the components in a map unit; the percentage of the component that each soil order represented was accumulated for all the soil orders present in the map unit. The soil order with the highest accumulated percentage is then characterized as the dominant condition for that unit. If a tie was found between soil orders, a “tie-break” rule was applied. The tie-break was based on the component’s “slope_r” attribute value, which represents the Slope Gradient – Representative Value. The slope_r values were accumulated in the same fashion as the soil order attributes, i.e., by soil order, and the order with the lowest slope_r value was selected as dominant because that represented the lower slope value, and therefore we assumed the soils were more likely to be staying in that area or being deposited in that area.