SSURGO Soils Data, Minnesota

The Soil Survey Geographic data set (SSURGO) from the Natural Resources Conservation Service is considered the best available digital soils data in Minnesota.
 

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New

• Crane Lake part of St. Louis County  6/14/11
  Some map units in the Boundary Waters and Forest Service areas are labeled "NOTCOM" which means not complete. These areas may be done at a later date but the rest of the county subset is done.

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Obtain and use SSURGO

The Soil Data Mart
NRCS's Soil Data Mart is the authoritative source for SSURGO data and reports. Since the data, especially the tabular portion, is evolving, it is important to make sure you have the most recent version from the site. NRCS includes a version number so that you can verify that you have the latest data.

• View maps and tabular reports online via the Web Soil Survey
• Download GIS data by county (note that for Crow Wing  and Pine counties, only a portion of the county is currently available - see map).
  • Choice of formats: shapefile, coverage or ArcInfo interchange
  • Choice of coordinates: geographic or UTM NAD83
  • Status maps showing availability of spatial and tabular data on the Data Mart
• Order SSURGO CDs
• Subscribe to be notified if data is updated for your county of interest.

Soil Data Viewer
This free ArcGIS extension from NRCS greatly streamlines the process of querying SSURGO data and producing reports and maps. Users who do not have ArcGIS but who have Microsoft Access can run a version that produces reports (no maps). NRCS provides complete installation instructions and a users guide, including help with obtaining and preparing SSURGO data for use with the extension.
 

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More information

• SSURGO documentation
• Minnesota status map (PDF format, 147K)
• National status map
• NASIS database: SSURGO soil attributes are now stored in Microsoft Access database tables; NASIS replaces the previous MUIR database.
• Research:  Thanks to a grant from the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, the University of Minnesota's Department of Soil, Water and Climate streamlined the SSURGO digitizing process by improving the methods to orthorectify the scanned maps and to extract lines from the scans. The process is dubbed "MAPLE_SYRUP."
   

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Other Minnesota soils data

For information on other soils data available in Minnesota, see MnGeo's soils information page.