A provisional ecological site is a conceptual grouping of soil map unit components within a major land resource area (MLRA) based on the similarities in response to management. Under the USDA-NRCS National Instruction, �Ecological Site Inventory and Ecological Site Description� one of the protocols for developing pESD�s includes defining soil properties to separate ecological sites. The National Instruction implements a 5-year initiative where all existing products, along with Soil Survey, should be utilized to the fullest extent possible in the process of developing priorities and allocating resources. A catena method and product was developed to identify major deficiencies within the soil survey proper and within supporting datasets.�Purpose of developing Catena�s: Problem-solving process capturing what we know about the landscape, develop hypotheses and asking questions, begin to notice patterns we cannot observe with existing products, communicate and debate others who seek answers based on evidence and logic of scale. In Soil Survey Region 2, MLRA 18, we contrasted a catena approach with map unit data evidence provided by SSURGO. We hypothesized that our catena product would identify two ecological site concepts and find a major deficiency within the soil properties data of the Coarsegold loam 45-75% map unit. After completing our catena approach we observed different vegetation potentials on both southern and northern hillslope exposures. We flagged the map unit for a soil survey update to investigate soil property patterns related to differences in aspect. Our team confirmed that our remote catena method captured two ecological site concepts and identified major soil property deficiencies within the soil survey proper and SSURGO data set.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.