Web Soil Survey for Sanctuary

The United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service operates a web based soil data and information tool called the Web Soil Survey. This tool was entirely new to me and it was a bit of a grind working my through the nuances of the tool to get the information I needed for soil data on Weyanoke Bird & Wildlife Sanctuary. 

A big caveat to this investigation is that the area of the sanctuary is smaller than the tool is intended for. The tool warned about this throughout the process. The sanctuary footprint is only about 9 acres. 

IMAGE BY GARRETT BIRD

Though small in size, the sanctuary does have some variability of soils within the site. There are 6 total different types, with the majority of the land comprised of Augusta-Urban land complex. The wetland areas are made up of Bohicket muck. Together these two make up almost 80% of the soils in the sanctuary. 

IMAGE BY GARRETT BIRD

Another feature I found interesting to look at was the depth to water table. As one would assume, the wetland area was 0 cm, but the northeast corner of the park scored in the >200 cm range. Also knowing the geographic makeup of the park pretty well, I'm not sure how accurate the information is, given the area marked in blue (region 22) is barely above the wetland line and I would not anticipate the depth to the water table of this area to be 153 cm. 

IMAGE BY GARRETT BIRD

Many other features didn't offer much usable information, but the final one that piqued my interest was the flooding frequency class. In my previous post, I talked about Norfolk's susceptibility to flooding and the fact that the sanctuary sits in an AE flood zone. It was no surprise to see here that the Web Soil Survey feature that measures Flood Frequency class also indicated frequent flooding. But it was interesting to see that some of the areas that marked for "None" or "Rare", including regions 22 and 1, are in the more densely purple, high flood risk, regions shown in the TITAN map (see previous post). 

IMAGE BY GARRETT BIRD