[Esip-soil-informatics] soil controlled vocabulary enquiry

Jennifer Harden 82soiljen at gmail.com
Wed Feb 17 16:09:59 EST 2021


Hi Megan. You asked about these things below;  I'm still not finding a
place where we wrote it up specifically but I'm still looking...



   1. collection/s with soil sampling methods eg ‘coring’ ‘at depth
   sampling’, and

"*Channel sample*" refers to soils sampled from a pit face or exposure and
collected vertically from the top of the horizon or layer  to the bottom
horizon/layer . We have also referred to "*pit face *sample" on our
sampling sheets. Specific notes about this however are rare unless the
field sheet has an entry  eg "hand dug pit" or "back hoe pit". It's rare
for field sheets to be scanned or re-entered verbatim. this is about as
close as we've gotten: *https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/0217/
<https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/0217/>    See table 1 *

Peatlands are a different animal. See this publication for one example
https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2012/1230/

Here is from the text of that citation - I don't think there are good
standard vocabularies for these !!  "At all sites, organic soil was sampled
using a variety of soil knives, scissors and corers, in order to obtain a
sample of known volume. For easily compressible, low-density samples, soil
blocks were cut with scissors or serrated knives and dimensions were
measured with a ruler. For less compressible shallow soils, samples were
obtained with a 50-mm diameter corer rotated with a portable electric drill
(Nadler and Wein, 1998). For deeper unfrozen peats we used a 70-mm diameter
by 130-centimeter (cm)-long tube that was pushed and rotated into the peat
by hand. A rubber cap was tightened over the corer to maintain a vacuum in
the corer during extraction. At permafrost plateau sites, permafrost cores
(up to 5 meters) were obtained using a SIPRE (Snow, Ice, and Permafrost
Research Establishment) corer (7.5-cm inside diameter) with a Tanaka power
head. We sampled peat until either a basal mineral or limnic horizon was
encountered to allow calculation of OC stocks relative to a standard basal
layer across sites. After collection, samples were placed in clean ziplock
bags and shipped to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) laboratories in Menlo
Park, California."


For consistency , these terms are sometimes used:
"*Core sample*" refers to a vertical core whose diameter is sometimes known
and sometimes used for bulk density

"*Auger sample*" refers also to a vertical core but diameter is often not
known because the bit at the end can be open/screw type and not all of the
sample is retained

 "Drive depths" used mostly in peat cores refers to how deep the core was
driven for the sample; drive depth typically has an upper and lower
boundary.

"Recovery depth" in peat cores is a victim of compaction during the core
driving; bulk density requires some sort of reckoning with the drive depth.








   1. 2. collection/s to describe the types of physical samples that
   observations are made on (which may be stored or thrown out once an
   observation is made on them) such as physical soil cores, subsamples etc.




Great question. for clarity of how things sometimes get processed,
sometimes we used "a" for archived; "m" for moisture; "b" for bulk density;
"i" for incubation; 14C or 13C for isotopes to refer to why the sample was
collected in the first place - that way the lab person knew how to handle
the sample.
So there are different types of splits:
Splits of the same sample from the field: typically subscripts are used
(a,b,c or 1,2,3)
Splits of the sample after homogenized in the lab: usually "1 of 2" etc
Citation:not sure we have one!

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 8:17 PM Megan Wong via Esip-soil-informatics <
esip-soil-informatics at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:

> Hello soil information folks,
>
>
>
> I hope you are all well. I am sorry to bother you with this enquiry by
> email, but I’m hoping amongst this community of experts someone may be able
> to help me out.
>
>
> To those of you who use soil related controlled vocabularies, can someone
> point me toward
>
>    1. collection/s with soil sampling methods eg ‘coring’ ‘at depth
>    sampling’, and
>    2. collection/s to describe the types of physical samples that
>    observations are made on (which may be stored or thrown out once an
>    observation is made on them) such as physical soil cores, subsamples etc.
>
>
>
> These are distinct from soil features, for which we are using INPIRE
> http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/featureconcept .
>
>
>
> Ideally, these would be as controlled vocabulary terms that are readable
> to humans and machines
>
>
>
> I've searched high and low - Perhaps the creation of a soil ontology will
> help ease some of these pain points! I’ve added to
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11oY2TIQIVnaNYfG-nXiOfWyQ17uVlReNX4qrdOYddeg/edit#gid=0
>  .
>
>
>
> If anyone is able to offer any advice here I am most grateful for your
> time
>
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Megan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *Dr Megan Wong*
>
> Research Associate | Centre of eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI)
>
>
>
> *I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which I work, and
> pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.*
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