Explanation. This year’s annual refresh will require all surveys to be processed. The tabular data for every published soil survey area must be exported from NASIS to the staging server. This requirement includes the NOTCOM soil survey areas. The spatial data is only posted for soil survey areas that had edits to the spatial data.
Update FY 2021 Surveys
Tabular data for surveys that have been updated and are ready to be published to WSS must be exported from NASIS on or after May 22, 2021, and processed as outlined below in steps 1-4.
Soil survey information published to the WSS will include the following:
1. All required national interpretations are automatically included when a survey is exported from NASIS to the staging server. Required national interpretations include all NASIS primary rules marked as ready to use in the NSSC Pangaea Rules folder. The SSS can supplement the national interpretations by selecting interpretations of interest from the “NSSC Regional Interpretations” folder or interpretations tagged for State use from any of the other “Regional Office” folders. These are located under the “select/view interps” export tab in NASIS. Any SSS who has questions about national interpretations or NSSC owned regional interpretations should contact Bob Dobos by email (bob.dobos@usda.gov). Any SSS who has questions about regional interpretations (non-NSSC owned) should contact the regional office.
2. At a minimum, the component text, as listed in the column named “Group” and nontechnical description as listed in the column named “Kind” must be checked for export under the “select/view text” export tab in NASIS. Verification, by the SSS, that all nontechnical descriptions are up-to-date and available for export can be determined by running the NASIS NSSC Pangaea report named “NASIS to Staging Server Export - Brief Soil Descrip Check”. A web based version of this report is available here. The web report may time out for larger States.
3. Any other text table data considered for export to WSS must be examined by the SSS to verify that personally identifiable information (PII) is removed or not published.
4. It is recommended that all components be exported, but the discretion of the SSS should be applied to the decision of whether minor components should be exported. At a minimum, every minor component that has been classified as a hydric soil must be exported.
The SSS will review and verify the data in the county and MLRA overlap tables. The SSS will finalize documentation of the legend certification history table before export.
Schedule of deadlines
To meet the July 1 deadline, a recommended schedule of sub-deadlines is as follows:
Regional offices should complete their work by May 21st. The SSS should complete his or her work by June 18th. The NSSC and Fort Collins staff should finish publishing the refreshed data to WSS starting by July 1st.
SSURGO Refresh Pre-Check Reports
When a survey is exported from NASIS to the staging server, a database stored procedure is run to check for a series of “Fatal Errors”. If an error exists, the export fails. To improve efficiency, the Database FOCUS Team wrote a report that pre checks surveys for all “Fatal Errors”. This allows the SSS and regional offices to identify and correct fatal errors before going through the export process.
The report is located in the NSSC Pangaea Report folder and is named “NASIS to Staging Server Export - Fatal Errors Pre Check.” A web based version of the report is also available here. When an error is found, the report calls a sub-report. The sub-report identifies where the errors are occurring and directs the SSS to those errors. This should greatly increase the efficiency of the SSS review by removing the time-consuming process of searching the errors and lighten the load on the server when the data is committed.
Over 3000 surveys are exported each year. The servers that process exports have a finite capacity and the process slows when numerous surveys are exported at once. Delays are common close to the final deadline, when export traffic increases. To avoid delays, it is strongly recommended that SSS do not wait until the last minute to complete exports.
Additional information that is specific to the export process is in chapter 17 of the NASIS User Guide. Is also found in Youtube NASIS Training Videos.
The WSS Refresh job aids and videos are located at the following URLs:
Export and Commit Official Soil Survey Data:
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/edu/ncss/?cid=nrcs142p2_054322#database_gen
Recall* and Commit Official Soil Survey Data:
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/edu/ncss/?cid=nrcs142p2_054322#database_gen
* The preferred method is to export from NASIS. Recall should only be used when absolutely necessary.
Guidance on the official soil survey information refresh policy has been written into Title 430, National Soil Survey Handbook (NSSH), Part 644, Subpart A, Section 644.2. Future guidance on the refresh of soil survey data will be referred to NSSH policy.
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