Digital Mapping and Updating Course

Editing Tools Team

Category and Subcategory proposals for Pictures

West Texas Telecommunications Project - Field Soil Scientist Toolbox

Bottom Line: Field soil scientists have many reasons for taking digital pictures. These include documentation as well as to provide pictures for manuscripts and the Web Soil Survey.
Most soil scientists have access to the Olympus C4000 cameras and are taking pictures with them. The understanding of this equipment and the organization and management of pictures can increase their value and ensure that they meet publication specifications.

Instructions for Digital Soil Survey Images by Jon Kelley SDQS MLRA Region 14. Digital SS Images_revised.doc (70 KB)

Directions for using the Olympus C4000 digital cameras by Jon Kelley SDQS MLRA Region 14. C4000 Instructions_revised.doc (61 KB)

Digital Photography Training by Jon Kelly SDQS MLRA Region 14. Digital Photography Training.pdf (206 KB)

Soil Survey Photography Principles and Techniques (From John Kelly SDQS MLRA Region 14 and NSSC)
Soil Survey Photography - Principles and Techniques.ppt (29.5 MB)

Need to update the guide to include more specific information digital pictures. Web Soil Survey will be able to use full color digital pictures and lots of them.

I personally love to take pictures and I am not the best manager of them. This is a link to a set of personal web pages to which I am posting pictures. (I am just learning how to do this on September 2, 2006). Some currently have captions and some do not. If individuals are interested in the original of a particular picture I can provide a link to it. Otherwise these are smaller sized versions for web viewing.

Are the specifications for the NRCS Photo Gallery appropriate for the Web Soil Survey? If so the specifications are as follows:
  • Photos in the Gallery are available in two common image formats: TIFF or JPEG.
  • Image resolution is generally 1500 x 2100 pixels (5" x 7" at 300 dpi).
  • TIFF images are 32 bit CMYK color, ranging from 6 mb to 12 mb in size.
  • JPEG images are 24 bit RGB color ranging from 200 kb to 400 kb in size.
  • Submission guidelines for the NRCS Photo Gallery: Submission guidelines.doc
  • and a Sample Excel workbook.xls to accompany the submission: EXCEL workbook
Past systems have been designed for selecting a very few photographs for hard copy published manuscripts.

Review of the photo gallery tab on the soils web page:

  1. Complete set of State soil profiles and landscapes

  2. Ninteen additional profiles of the 23,000 Soil Series

  3. Five Soil landscape pictures with captions that do not describe the soils

  4. Dominant Soil Orders includes 12 pictures of soil profiles.

  5. NRCS Photo Gallery is very Lean on soil related captions

    • 54 pictures under the soil survey category. Where are the hundreds of thousands of photographs taken by soil scientists?


  6. The Earth Science World ImageBank link provides photographs for noncommercial and commercial Use through the American Geological Institute. Refer to this site for examples of the information that must be collected to increase the value of a photograph.

While discussion concerning the development of a national system for managing images for the Web Soil Survey is taking place, field soil scientists have the opportunity to design the local systems for managing photographs to feed into the National System.

Photographs and diagrams are of no use without their associated captions. How can field soil scientists link photographs to their associated captions and mapunits/components and share those links/photograps nationally?

Should Site Photos be associated with Sites or Site observations?

Current Site Observation Kinds
  1. correlation notes
  2. miscellaneous notes
  3. site observation, formatted
  4. site observation, unformatted
  5. windows pedon import issue
Site Note Kinds
  1. Conversion problem
  2. correlation notes
  3. miscellanewouls notes
  4. site note, formatted
  5. site note, unformatted
  6. windows pedon import issue
Pedon Note Kinds
  1. Conversion problem
  2. correlation notes
  3. miscellanewouls notes
  4. Pedon Conversion
  5. Pedon note, formatted
  6. Pedon note, unformatted
  7. windows pedon import issue

Proposed Site/Site Observation Text Note Categories (currently 20 character limit)
  1. Photograph
  2. Diagram
  3. Caption
  4. Video

Site Observation Text Note Categories used in Montana Migrator
  1. Site
  2. Photo
  3. Photo/Veg
  4. Veg
  5. Polygon
Proposed Pedon Text Note Categories (currently 20 character limit)
  1. Photograph
  2. Diagram
  3. Caption
  4. Video
Proposed Site Text Note Subcategories (currently 20 character limit)
  1. Free form - to aid in querying
Proposed Pedon Text Note Subcategories (currently 20 character limit)
  1. Free form - to aid in querying
Examples of the uses of pictures:

The Bottom Line: What can I do to protect the environment?
  • Keep soil covered - It helps keep soil in place. Cover_me.pdf (130 KB)
  • Disturb the soil as little as possible - It helps the natural organisms in the soil clean our water and hold soil in place. Disturbed.pdf (101 KB) Little_disturbance.pdf (96 KB)
  • Keep soil clean - What goes in the soil can end up in your glass. Soil filters our water, but can not filter everyting(200 KB)
  • Use as few chemicals as possible and choose those that easily degrade in the environment or are non-toxic.

    • Communications

    Charters

    Pedon PC

    NASIS Reports - Interpretations

    Educational Page

    Erosion and Sediment Control

    Field Measured Properties

    Metadata

    Quality Assurance of Point Data

    Analysis Tools (Under Construction)