 All right, navigating web soil survey and the Reclamation Suitability Tool. So what do we got going on here? Let's take a look. So the case for why, oh, it was September 2017, Miranda and Tom came to myself and Mark Hayek and Lance Dewey on my staff and asked for some strategies to help improve reclamation processes on these pipeline corridors and so on. So anyway, a little bit of notice to them. I've been going in with this idea of putting together a tool, an interpretation like this for over 20 years in Montana as a data quality specialist that I worked with, Mike Hansen. And we put together a version of it for Montana, but this one here I think is a little more robust and I'm a little more happy with the results that we see there. And so industry was coming to them with looking for those answers to the questions and then ultimately our landowners, our land managers, our land renters are all gonna benefit from having this knowledge up front. And so a lot of caveats that come along with that, what are issues, our costs and feasibility is you go along a corridor like that and you move from position to position on the landform. You move them from ecological site to ecological site and each one of those has its own set of unique species. And so that would be a unique mix and so on and all kinds of complication in designing a successful or potentially successful seed mix for that corridor especially with the size of the equipment that we're using. So it's just plain not practical, it's expensive. And then that's not even accounting for the fact that we have all of the establishment issues that we have in the dry climate that we have here. So we're working with in Western North Dakota some of the most highly erosion fragile soils in the country, you know, and the biggest limitations being that low precipitation that we get in those steep slopes and that's just those marine deposits are full of sodium, chloride, sulfate salts and what have you. And then you add the complexity of some of our lower water receiving wet areas and the opportunity for salinization from evaporation there, establishment issues when we're inundated and saturated along with all of the equipment limitations that comes along with dealing with wet areas too. So all kinds of fun. And so how can we increase our success? And so I've always been told if you fail to plan you plan to fail. So we got to do a little bit of planning, get up front and get out front of this thing if we expect to succeed. And so some of my ideas and strategies when we started visiting about this is that I knew from my background working with the National Soil Information System and the data that's in WebSol survey that we can identify those problem areas and avoid them, either work around them or use technology to go under them and avoid those areas where we expect to fail and focus our efforts on those areas where we can have successes. And so along with that, just we implement that effective site management strategy before we ever lay one piece of equipment on the ground and plan to separate that top soil from the subsoil. We know that works. Go after it with a strategy where we minimize that surface disturbance and minimize the compaction that comes along with it. And as you look across the state or even the nation there is not one soil that isn't affected by water and wind erosion at some level. And so plan to use those practices install those practices that minimize that the mulch, the erosion control mats, fiber rolls and all of those things that are out there around and technology continues to increase there. And so that we can reduce that sediment, slow that runoff, reduce our soil losses, minimize surface pollution and also have lower impact on our wildlife habitat. So lots of things going on there. So what did we do? So the first thing we did is we convened a panel of experts, whether it from industry from other federal agencies, there are researchers, NDSU, myself, other people on my staff or in my agency. And we sat down and we worked through the criteria. Sam, some quote, she put together a set of sites and we went through those one by one where there were either failures or successes and we went through them one by one, identified the reason it failed or what the limitation of that site was for the end result and come up with a list of those soil properties and qualities and set the limits where we expected it to perform and not perform. And so that was a big help. That's where we just start. And so then I took that information and I sat down in front of the NASA's database, National Soil Information System. It's the motor behind Web Soil Survey it's the most robust natural resource database in the world. And so we can truly say that we're working with the world's best dataset. We've got in a couple of years here, we'll have 125 years worth of data to support and act as a backdrop to support our decisions with. And so I sat down with that database and began to write a set of SQL queries and put together the properties and evaluations and rules that would drive this interpretation. And this is kind of a visual model of what that looks like there. It has three main rules and sub rules there. This contains site characteristics and the sub rules with that, physical soil properties and chemical soil properties. And it's an onion of sorts. And so each one of these green bars is a rule and I've added multipliers. That's for adjustments as we use it and watch it perform and if we see it driving more on one level than another, we can make those adjustments. But it's easier for me to put those pieces in place before I need them than after the fact so I don't have to tear it completely apart. And that and operator there is significant. What that tells me that I'm going to do is I'm gonna choose the minimum value. And so what I've got here is each one of these rules is gonna generate a numerical value for me. And when I use that and operator, I'm going to use the lowest value and kick that forward as my rating for the interpretation on that particular soil. And so as we peel the onion, we looked at site characteristics. And so these are the above ground things you see as you're standing on the ground slope. So we're looking at steepness, which is going to, you know, and your equipment limitations are all going to increase as that slope gets steeper aspect. We're looking at the difference in effective pre-sip on the cool aspects in North, Northeast aspects versus the South, Southwest aspects. And you're just always a quick dryer on the South aspects. Depth to seasonal high water table. Again, you're looking at equipment limitations and saturation and slowing your opportunities for germination to occur and so on. Ponding those water receiving areas during spring runoff, during severe thunderstorms and so on, you're going to pond for a long, very long durations as a goodness with that water gonna sit there long enough to impede the performance of those plants or not. Same thing with flooding. You put that fast moving water on the landscape and you have the opportunity to destroy all the work you've put in to establish those practices or get them in place at least. And so the next thing we're looking at is surface fragments, you know, stones and boulders. You know, obviously we're going to limit our equipment when we encounter those. So we wanna account for those areas on the landscape. And interidity, we're looking at a climate piece here where, and these are those areas where evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation. So we're losing more water than we're receiving on those sites. It's gonna make it more difficult for those plants to succeed when we're in that dry, arid climate. Moving on to our physical soil properties, you know, available water capacity, you know, how much of that, how much water can that profile hold? And where are we at? You know, we know that when we hit that permanent wilting point, we're at 15 bar pressure, we're going to lose our plants. We know that when we get to that maximum allowable deficiency is usually at about 50% of that available water capacity. We start to see our warm season plants will suffer a little bit or degrade in performance. And we also know that those cool season plants, those that come in early spring are just a little bit more sensitive. What I find in the literature is that that starts to, they start to be affected when we get that maximum allowable deficiency at about 40% of the available water. And we looked at organic matter. The more organic matter you have, the more ability you have to hang onto that water and keep it in the profile. And that organic matter will also add to your natural fertility. And then we looked at clay content that plain content is there for the simple reason. It's sticky and so that stickiness will muck up your equipment and so it causes equipment limitations and workability of your site. Again, stones and boulders and cobbles in the surface rather than laying on the surface are also something that we want to look at. And then we looked at that rooting depth, the depth to bedrock, whether it be hard or soft bedrock or, and we also looked at whether that parent material was sandy or not. All of these physical and chemical properties that we looked at, we only looked to a depth of 30 centimeters, about one foot, looking at that depth where we're going to at least get that plant a good start, get a rooting system started and get it on its way. Chemical soil properties, we looked at electrical conductivity, which is an indication of salinity. Most of us know that sodium absorption ratio, that presence of sodium is as in a dispersive effect on the soil and it causes it to seal up. And so we want to pay attention to that pH, we're looking at pH and most of what we're looking at there is nutrient availability. So we want to find that ideal pH between 6.5 and 7.5 where we have the most nutrients available. And then we looked at calcium carbonate equivalent. And so calcium carbonate, it's a salt that's going to act as a desiccant and it's going to, you know, raise your pH. And so we're looking at nutrient availability there. It also tends to coat the particles and when we're at the surface with that calcium carbonate, we're more susceptible to wind erosion. So we want to keep that into account. And so this is, this is a layer. Let me dig into the onion, another layer deeper. And for each of these, these soil properties we had to put together an evaluation. So how did we handle that? And so I think we had just under 20 different soil properties and qualities that we evaluated. And so this is nothing more than a visual representation. We're looking at slope here. I'll describe one of them and then we'll let you go hunt down and teach yourself about the other, the other 15 or 20 or however many there are. So what we're looking at there is we're saying that we are well suited with a slope that's less than or equal to 9%. So along the left margin here we got numbers that range from zero to one. And so zero, we're absolutely not suited. And one, we are absolutely suited. And so when we say less than or equal to nine our membership is 100%, we are well suited. And then conversely, when we look at a slope that's greater than or equal to 15%, we say we were absolutely not suited and we give that a value of zero. And in between those two values, we have partial membership and we fall out along this line. The closer we are to zero, the more limited it is, the closer we are to one, the less limited it is and the suitability like that. And so that's the crux of the onion. There's a lot more of the querying language and stuff like that. No sense in putting that in front of you unless you wanna sit down and learn how to program. Most of that you won't retain anyway. So we'll go into that next. And so the show you work part of it, those of you that wanna dig in and go find that stuff. This is just a screenshot of a web soil survey and as you get more familiar, whoops, we wanna get back in there. And once you get an area of interest selected if you go to the soil data explorer tab and then to the soil reports tab, come under area of interest and there's a report in there that says national soil interpretation description and criteria summary. And so you grab that report and then come down and select the interpretation you're looking at. In this case, reclamation suitability and put a checkbox in front of it that ND and parentheses doesn't mean anything other than the fact that that interpretation was programmed with North Dakota in mind. And so all of that stuff is put together by myself at this point, I'm the only one in North Dakota that has the skill set to script these and put them together and be happy to teach you if you wanna know, because that skill set needs to get passed on somewhere along the line. But anyway, if you run that report by hitting view soil report and it'll generate this text document that I wrote and you can go in and pick apart all of the details that I just shared you about slope for each of those soil properties and qualities that we use in this interpretation and the logic that was used for each of those is stated in there too. So then you can understand the science behind what we did here. And so beauty of doing something like this is that once I did acre one, I'm in a situation where I can do the other 54,250,000 acres in North Dakota in the press of a button. And so we know where we're limited and where we're not limited, where we're going to have success or most likely to have success and where we need to think real good and hard about what we're doing before we do it. And so that's kind of where we're at and what we've created. And it's fun to have that in place after thinking about it for 15 or 20 years and actually pulling it off. Now let's see if the speakers will let me get closer to the computer here. I'm going to jump out of there and into get the crutches on here and into web soil survey and show you how to use some of these tools. Find your favorite browser and type in web soil survey. 99.9% of the time it's the top one. Just make sure it says nrcs.usda.gov and the URL there and give it a launch. One secret is to close some of these windows behind you to increase your performance. Pay attention to the start page. Those of you that haven't used it, there's lots of how to and find your way and you can teach yourself if you're patient. And it won't be a labor that most people just whack that start your web soil survey button and go after it. And we're in. So as it draws, there's several ways to go after your area of interest. Those of you that are more advanced with GIS, you can import a shape file. And so those of you that have multiple part, multiple polygon areas of interest that allow you to bring that in as a shape file rather than draw your one uninventive rectangle around what you're looking at. There's other things like the that long which is just a point, the public land survey system which is gonna get you to your favorite section in the world. And I typically use this little survey area. And so I'm going to just jump in there, grab Mark Dakota. And we'll take you on a tour of Dunn County today. Hit the radio button. And then I'm gonna hit set the AOI right there. And it'll draw all of Dunn County out for me. So another thing that you can do if you want is you can use these tools right here in the end, the AOI tools to draw a small polygon and just worry about that part of the world that you're in if you want to. Once we're there, you can go to that soil map tab and you get a feel for the symbols, the map unit descriptions and how much of the area each map unit has. Each of these map unit names is linked to a map unit descriptions. You can go in there and learn more about the composition and landforms that things are on and everything. But to save you some time, I'm gonna go back to that area of interest tab and the quickest way to find what you're looking for is to use this handy-dandy search engine. All you gotta do is, in my case, know how to spell a little bit. And so we'll type in reclamation suitability and hit return. And there we go. We come up with that outline there. And the thing about that outline is each one of those bold things there are going to correspond to a tab in the database. And so it tells you where you don't have a match and where you do have a match. I'm gonna jump down to the suitability's limitations. Click on this one here and I'll find a hyperlink that if I click on it, it'll jump me right to that part of WebSwell survey that I wanna use the most. Several other ways to navigate through there. You can click on the individual tabs and find your way through that. It's relatively intuitive. But if you aren't familiar with it, it's handier to find your way through there. And so what we've got here, keep this from, I'm gonna expand and tuck that up a little bit. So under land management, we've got our limitations and suitability. So there's a quick description. And for each interpretation that you run, you wanna take and spend a little bit of time reading about how the values are. Some are designed as limitations where the low numbers are good and the high numbers are bad and vice versa. For a suitability, what we're looking at, high numbers are good, low numbers are bad. So pretty intuitive there. So let's go ahead and we'll launch that and view the rating, wait, port to draw. And there we have it. There's a five color, so you click on that. Legend tab, it'll pop out and give you your color sequence. Of course, red is not suited, that dark green is well-suited. And then I chose to divide the somewhat suited into three categories, markedly well-suited, somewhat suited and poorly suited because I felt like it had more meaning. And I broke those at 0.9, 0.6 and 0.3. So zero to 0.3 is poorly suited, 0.3 to six is somewhat suited and 0.6 to 0.9 are smartly well-suited and so on. And as we move in on that, we can zoom in a little bit, let it draw. You can see that that has more meaning than if the orange and the yellow and light green were all yellow in there. You get a little more of a sensibility for how much more useful it is when you have those five classes versus three. So there's a quick look at the map. And then we'll take a little bit of time here and understand the report. Well, at least suited is our interpretation, but we've got two different things going on in this map. Site characteristics at 0.75, the most limiting one is that 0.68 there for soil physical properties, but you see that that low number only represents 5% of that map unit. We're looking at the dominant condition. So the dominant condition is that site characteristics driving in at that 0.75, which give us that moderately well-suited. And so I got one more I'll explain to you that it's a little more enlightening or maybe it's confusing, hopefully not that. So let's take a look at this band on the map unit. And what we see is that we got chemical soil properties, and site characteristics firing out on these three components pretty regularly. But the only consistent one is that the chemical soil properties are firing at zero or unsuited for all three of those components. And so that's your dominant condition there. The physical characteristics are all there, but they're not all at zero. This one's at 0.6 and so on. But the thing to pay attention to though and do a little bit of math and you find that that's only 79% of that map unit. Where's the other 21%? Anything that rates a one or well-suited isn't there sure well up in this table? So we've got 79% of our map unit that's unsuited, but there's still 21% of it that's suited or usable. So you wanna take some time, get to know those data, understand your situation and go after that. And it takes a little patience, a little bit of time, but it is definitely doable. And so also, as you're doing that, take the time. As you're going through and working through a web-social survey, you can create a printable version of any map that you're looking at on the spot. It'll create a PDF document, you can save it to your computer and have it go back and we draw that map. Or as you're working through several interpretations in a session, you can add them to the shopping cart there. And then when you're done with your session, you can come over here to this shopping cart tab, pop that down, go in to the shopping cart and it'll show you those sessions, sections that you save. You can check them on or off, keep the ones you want, throw the ones you don't want and download a version and have your own custom soil resource report. Don't try to print it. It was just to watch the trees pop right off the landscape if you get print on those. So there's a lot of data in there. Let's jump into the soil reports tab and there's a couple of things to show you in there. What are we doing for time? Get a couple of minutes, all right. So if you go into this component soil legend, check that include minor soils, it gets the full resolution of the database, not just the major components. And so what you'll see there is that you get the full resolution of the slope of the composition of each map unit there. There's seven components in that map unit and that their proportion. And your slope, this is the slope column here and I just scrolled up too far, but it's got a low, a representative value and a high. All of our data elements have that clay, sand percent slope. And so our range is zero to 2% there, but a representative value is one. And so a lot of our interpretations are driven by those representative values. And so there's a lot of resolution to these data tubes. With that, our next steps are to take what we have here and go after those units that are less limited, that aren't poorly or unsuited and look at grouping those ecological sites that are assigned to those and do a better job of simplifying what needs to happen. As far as creating seed mixes and make that more simple to use and help you work your way across a pipeline scar and have more success in that application there. So I'm gonna leave that right there and get a little bit of time for questions, not much, but is anybody got anything to ask? Brenda? Is there a good inclusion in a good map unit or a good inclusion in a bad map unit? Is there a way to know you're on those small percentages? Yes, the best way to know is to use that map unit description and figure out what position on the landform those soils occur at. And so we'll say on the back slope or on the foot slope on an escarpment or where that position is and get to know where you're at within the polygon. And associate the individual components with the individual positions on the landform because that's the differences that we were recognizing and where those contrasting interpretations happen or why they're there.