FAQ

The Soil Sites SA database uses standards described in the Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook and the national soil site database template designed by CSIRO and the Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program.

A large core set of authoritative soil site data has come from the State Land and Soil Mapping Program (1986-2001). For more information refer to The soils of southern South Australia (Hall et al 2009 part 1, part 2 - see page 5 of part 1).

Currently, you cannot add your own soil data to Soil Sites SA. There are plans to provide this facility in the future. Please Contact Us for further information.

Soil Sites SA follows a hierarchical data structure, as shown in the diagram.

Currently, the types of sites available are:

• Free survey sites typically represent one-off sampling.
• Characterisation sites provide a one-off, very detailed description of a locally representative soil type. These offer high quality soil site information from an excavated pit (often down to ~2 m depth), with photos, interpreted descriptions and comprehensive chemical laboratory test results.
• Soil profile types indicate where a site is assigned a class in South Australia’s soil classification system. Refer to The soils of southern South Australia (Hall et al 2009) [part 1, part 2] for more information.

More types of sites (i.e. grid, monitoring and transect) will become available as more data is collected.

Most land is privately owned, so land managers, with support from Government agencies, Natural Resource Management Boards, industry bodies and conservation groups, are working to improve the condition of natural resources. By adopting sustainable soil management practices, land managers can optimise the productive capacity and future health of our natural resources.

Sometimes people get it wrong. If you see data that looks highly questionable, please Contact Us with relevant information, including the Site Id and a description of your query.

Occasionally in the data (usually in deeper layers) some horizon depth ranges are unknown or not recorded. This may occur where:

• A deep underlying substrate (e.g. sedimentary materials or weathered rock) has been reached and the site describer decides to stop digging, but wishes to flag the start of the underlying material.
• Similarly, the deepest layer is so hard (e.g. bedrock) that further digging is not possible.
• Extracted samples may have been loose when brought to the surface, and depth ranges weren’t able to be reliably determined.

A Download CSV link will be provided at the top of the search results list. This link enables users to download a zip file containing comma separated variable (CSV) spreadsheet files with available data. As the number of sites in the search results increases, due to the complexity of the data, creation of a tailored Download CSV file becomes excessively time-consuming. For optimum performance, the tailored Download CSV link is currently only available for search results containing up to 2000 sites. If search results exceed that threshold, users are directed to a pre-generated download file containing all public site data for the State.

Lab method code descriptions are contained in the soil site database template

We suggest using the Google Chrome browser to access Soil Sites SA. Currently, some of the functionality in Soil Sites SA is not compatible with other browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.