soilDB 2.3

The source code for soilDB 2.3 has posted to CRAN, expecting binary packages later this week.

The soilDB package contains a convenient interface to many USDA-NCSS soil databases, including:

• SDA: SSURGO/STATSGO
• NASIS
• KSSL via SoilWeb
• An approximate "soil series" database via SoilWeb
• Henry Soil Temperature and Water Database
• SCAN/SNOTEL
• CDEC

New / Updated Documentation

• HTML manual pages
• draft tutorial on the use of siblings()
• draft document on querying soil series data
• draft document on soil series climate summaries
• draft document on competing soil series

Enhancements

• new function for exploring soil series co-occurrence data: siblings()
• fetchOSD gets an overhaul, new API and features
• fetchOSD(..., extended=TRUE) gets competing soil series
• new function for spatial queries: SDA_spatialQuery(), still needs testing and documentation
• experimental interface to SoillWeb OSD fulltext search: OSDquery()
• get_mutext_from_NASIS_db() added for extraction of map unit text notes
• exposing some of the internal functionality used by fetchHenry

Bug Fixes

• numerous bug-fixes in simplifyFragmentData()
• better bug-fix for fetchSCAN and missing data
• added more SCAN/SNOTEL metadata
• generalized local NASIS ODBC authentication, should work on windows 7, 8, 10
• bug fix for subtle change in how SCAN data are returned from web service
• bug fix for simplfyFragmentData(, nullFragsAreZero=FALSE), still more work to do
• bug fix for simplfyFragmentData() when fragment volume > 100%

Misc. Changes

• removed old sample gSSURGO chunk and related documentation
• updated loafercreek and gopheridge sample datasets and manual page to reflect latest fetchNASIS