CEAP-Grazing-Lands

CEAP Grazing Lands

View project on GitHub

CEAP Grazing Lands

SSURGO query tooling and soil-characteristic extraction for grazing land analysis

This repository documents SQL workflows, reference materials, and supporting resources developed for CEAP Grazing Lands to extract and organize SSURGO / gSSURGO soil characteristics for modeling, analysis, and related project work.

The project focuses on helping users retrieve specific soil properties and component-level information that support vegetation, hydrology, grazing-land assessment, and conservation-effect modeling.

Repository links

Project purpose

The goal of this work is to provide a practical way to extract soil characteristic data from gSSURGO / SSURGO for use in CEAP Grazing Lands modeling and related analytical workflows.

This includes support for:

  • identifying soil properties that influence vegetation and water dynamics
  • organizing data for modeling conservation practice effects
  • enabling tabular and spatial review of soil component information
  • improving access to soil characteristics needed by analysts and project collaborators

Why this project matters

Grazing-land and conservation modeling often depend on access to well-structured soil data that is not always easy to assemble for analytical use. This repository helps bridge that gap by documenting SQL-based approaches for retrieving and organizing soils information relevant to project workflows.

It is particularly useful for users working with:

  • SSURGO and gSSURGO data
  • soil property extraction
  • grazing-land assessment
  • conservation analysis
  • NRCS-related data workflows
  • map-based and tabular soil review

What this repository contains

This repository includes:

  • SQL scripts for CEAP Grazing Lands data extraction
  • supporting spreadsheets and reference documentation
  • links to management studio and Soil Data Access versions of queries
  • descriptions of key soil characteristics used in analysis
  • supporting context for MLRAs and basemap layers

Key resources

Additional information

  1. SQL version provided by Paul Finnell
  2. Project spreadsheet and data requirements

SQL resources

  1. SSURGO QT Management Studio
  2. SSURGO QT Soil Data Access - State or Soil Survey Area

Soil characteristics addressed

The repository is designed to help retrieve and review soil information such as:

  • soil moisture and temperature classes, subclasses, and regimes
  • surface texture characteristics
  • surface cover of coarse fragments
  • coarse fragments in the top horizon
  • soil depth
  • water table information
  • hydrologic group
  • slope class
  • available water capacity and storage
  • soil chemistry characteristics
  • restrictions and restriction kinds
  • diagnostic horizons and features
  • ecological site identifiers and names
  • soil component names

These data elements help support deeper analytical understanding of the soil factors that influence grazing-land performance and conservation outcomes.

Reference geography and map context

Major Land Resource Areas (MLRAs)

Major Land Resource Areas are included as a reference layer to support querying and interpretation. They provide regional context tied to soils, climate, water resources, land use, physiography, geology, and biological resources.

Base maps

The tool context uses standard basemap resources to provide geographic orientation and support interpretation of selected areas.

Audiences

This repository is most useful for:

  • soil scientists
  • GIS specialists
  • conservation analysts
  • grazing-land modelers
  • NRCS-related technical staff
  • users needing structured soil-property extraction from SSURGO/gSSURGO

Technologies and data themes

  • SQL / T-SQL
  • SSURGO / gSSURGO
  • soil property extraction
  • conservation analysis
  • grazing lands
  • NRCS workflows
  • GitHub Pages

Best-practice improvement ideas

To make this repository even stronger for technical audiences and hiring visibility, consider adding:

  • sample outputs or screenshots from the tool
  • a short workflow diagram showing how data moves from SSURGO to analysis
  • a “how to use this repository” section for new users
  • a file structure summary for SQL, documents, and site content
  • notes on intended users and downstream modeling use cases

If you work with soil data, grazing-land analysis, SSURGO workflows, or conservation modeling, this repository provides a strong example of applied soil-data extraction for real-world analytical use.