Soil Geographic Databases — North America, Central America and the Caribbean

Index: México | USA |Canada |Central America | Caribbean

México

• México: Conjunto de Datos Vectorial Edafológico, Escala 1:250 000
  "Información geoespacial que muestra la distribución de los principales tipos de suelo en el territorio nacional, así como los atributos físicos, químicos y limitantes físicas y químicas presentes, de acuerdo con la base referencial mundial del recurso suelo de la FAO (WRB por sus siglas en inglés)"
   

USA

• Official soil survey products of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) of the USA
  • Geospatial Data Gateway (GDG) of the (USA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). To download digital SGDB for a user-defined area, click on the link "Order by...", and once the area is selected, specify SSURGO 2.2 (semi-detailed, source scale 1:12 000 to 1:25 000) and/or STATSGO2 (1:250 000, generalized from SSURGO).
    To download digital SGDB for a State, click on the link "Order by...", and then "by State". Once the State is selected, scroll down and "Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) by State". This includes the gSSURGO rasters (see below) but also a seamless polygon map of all the SSURGO 2.2 polygons, with attribute tables, in ESRI geodatabases format.  
     
  • Gridded National Soil Survey Geographic Database (gNATSGO)
    A composite database that provides the best available soils information for all areas of the United States and Island Territories. It was created by combining data from the Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO), State Soil Geographic Database (STATSGO2), and Raster Soil Survey Databases (RSS) into a single seamless ESRI file geodatabase.  
     
  • STATSGO2
    STATSGO2 is 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 of 1:250,000 in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands and 1:1,000,000 in Alaska. Files can be directly accessed at the NRCS Box repository
     
  • Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) Database
    A seamless version of SSURGO (detailed soil map), which can be reclassified with properties or interpretations. Despite the name it is a vector coverage as ESRI geodatabases, not gridded but can easily be rasterized. No map unit disaggregation, but properties are estimated from map unit composition. See POLARIS (below) for a disaggregated (more detailed, harmonized) product. Files can be directly accessed at the NRCS Box repository
     
  • SSURGO Portal (beta)
    "a license free application that allows you to import spatial and tabular SSURGO data into geospatial SQLite SSURGO Template databases"  
  • Web Soil Survey
    The same data for download as from the Geospatial Data Gateway; use the "Download Soils Data" tab. An advantage is the possibility to select an area of interest, which may cover several soil survey areas.
     
  • SoilWeb
    Another interface to SSURGO and NATSGO maps, from the California Soil Resource Lab. Uses either Google Maps or Google Earth. The latter is an incredible interface, showing polygons at appropriate display scale, click-through for map unit description with profile diagrams, block diagrams of typical landscape positions; also shows locations of typifying pedons. Also available as iPhone or Android apps.
     
  • Gridded Soil Properties of the Continental USA
    Gridded (800x800 m) maps of selected soil properties throughout the continental United States, interactive and downloadable as GeoTIFF. Maps were created by aggregating SSURGO, back-filled with NATSGO where SSURGO is not available. Chemical, physical, land use, soil colour. Some properties directly useful for land use: land capability, Kw, hydrologic group, soil thickness, wind erodibility. Also from the California Soil Resource Lab.
     
  • Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory (KSSL), National Soil Survey Center Soil Characterization Data
    "Analytical data for more than 20,000 pedons of U. S. soils and about 1,100 pedons from other countries. Standard morphological pedon descriptions are available for about 15,000 of these pedons". The above link describes the dataset; it can be downloaded from the NCSS Soil Characterization Database page.
     
  • GlobalSoilMap v0.5 (USA)
    The USA's contribution to the GlobalSoilMap.net project, which is currently on-hold. This product from 2015 is however fully in accordance with the specifications: 6 standard depth intervals based on equal area spline functions (0-5; 5-15; 15-30; 30-60; 60-100; and 100-200cm) for twelve soil properties (total profile depth-cm; plant exploitable (effective) soil depth-cm; organic carbon-g/kg; pH1:5 water; sand-g/kg; silt-g/kg; clay-g/kg; gravel-m3 m-3; ECEC-cmolc/kg; bulk density (< 2 mm) fraction-Mg/m3; bulk density of the whole soil in situ (includes gravel)-Mg/m3; and available water capacity-mm. Nominal grid resolution is 3" of arc, about 100m. An extensive database includes uncertainty estimates. Explained by the NRCS here.  
     
  • National Soil Information System NASIS
    The dynamic internal database behind products including SSURGO and Web Soil Survey. Not for use outside NRCS, but you could ask for access conditions.  
     
• Other USA products (not NRCS)
   
  • POLARIS soil series and properties, Chaney et al. "constructed using available high-resolution geospatial environmental data and a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm (DSMART-HPC) to remap the Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database." Fills gaps, removes discontinuities at survey area edges, gives probabilities of each class; (2) PROPERTIES: 30-meter probabilistic maps of soil properties of the contiguous United States. Described in Water Resources Research 55:2916, Chaney et al. Infers properties from series.
     
  • USA48 Soil Properties and Class 100m Grids United States Predictive maps of soil properties and Soil Taxonomy Great Groups, based on three national U.S. soil point datasets: NCSS Characterization Database, the National Soil Information System (NASIS), and the Rapid Carbon Assessment (RaCA) datasets, and using a predictive mapping framework similar to SoilGrids v1 but with additional covariates specific to the USA. Hosted at Penn State University.
     
  • National [USA] Geochemical Database: Soil  
     
  • Geochemical and Mineralogical Data for Soils of the Conterminous United States

    Described in Geochemical and mineralogical soil survey of the conterminous USA: a project retrospective. Relation to previous list item not clear  
     

  • European digital archive on soil maps (EuDASM)
    Scanned soil maps available for Canada & the USA.
     
  • European digital archive on soil maps (EuDASM)
    Scanned soil maps available for "South America", including México.

Canada

• Canadian Soil Information Service
  Includes Soil Landscapes of Canada (SLC) for the entire territory at 1:1'000 000 and detailed soil surveys (1:20 000 to 1:250 000) for most of the agricultural area. Also includes the National Pedon Database (NPDB), which contains pedon data that has been collected from across Canada.
   

Central America

• Guatemala Soil Organic Carbon Database (0 to 30 cm, 1965-2010  
  • Documentation: Vásquez, A., Varón-Ramírez, V. M., Tobías, H., & Guevara, M. (2024). Guatemala soil organic carbon database (GTMSOC). European Journal of Soil Science, 75(1), e13450. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejss.13450
     
• SOTERLAC
  SOTER for Latin America & Caribbean, 1:5M.  
   
• European digital archive on soil maps (EuDASM)
  Scanned soil maps available for "South America", including Central America.

Caribbean

• SOTER for Cuba, 1:1M  
   
• SOTERLAC
  SOTER for Latin America & Caribbean, 1:5M.  
   
• European digital archive on soil maps (EuDASM)
  Scanned soil maps available for "South America", including the Caribbean islands.