David Jacquier’s (CSIRO) presentation on the Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program (ACLEP) and the Australian Soil Resource Information System (ASRIS). Made to members and guests of the Riverina Branch of the Australian Society of Soil Science at a Soils Database Workshop, Albury-Wodonga campus of Charles Sturt University, on the 7 June 2013

1. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program
- ASRIS, SoilMapp, National Soil Archive, Data Standards
LAND AND WATER /SOIL AND LANDSCAPE SCIENCE
David Jacquier
7 June 2013
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2. Background
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier2 |
Soil Survey in Australia
• States and territories are responsible for the soil survey coverage
• Coverage is not complete, is mostly broad scale, and varies in quality
• Considerable experimentation with new methods (e.g. airborne gamma-ray
spectroscopy, DEMs, climate surfaces) to fill data gaps
• The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program (ACLEP) is developing
standards and better methods for acquiring and using soil information
• The National Committee on Soil and Terrain (NCST) is the steering committee
for ACLEP. The NCST is comprised of membership from the state and territory
agencies responsible for soil survey and from federal agencies in related
fields

3. Data Standards
3 |
ACLEP publishes handbooks and guidelines for soil survey
practitioners
Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook
Guidelines for Surveying Soil and Land Resources
The Australian Soil Classification
Soil Physical Measurement and Interpretation for Land Evaluation
These publications provide guidance on undertaking surveys,
recommended analytical techniques and are the vocabularies for
data storage applications.
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

4. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier
Australian Soil Resource Information System
4 |
ASRIS is an online geographic information system and it:
• Provides access to the best available soil and land resource information
across Australia
• Combines the best of qualitative mapping with new quantitative information
• Integrates soil and land information from many sources
• Opens many new possibilities for monitoring and forecasting the condition of
Australia’s soils and landscapes
• Focuses on providing estimates of functional soil attributes (e.g. soil pH,
electrical conductivity, available water capacity) and uses soil classification as
a means of communication

5. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier5 |

6. 6 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

7. The ASRIS data model (1)
7 |
The key elements:
• A spatial hierarchy of land units with seven levels of generalization
– The upper three levels provide general descriptions of soils and landscapes
across the continent.
– Lower levels provide detailed information for regions where mapping is
complete
• A consistent set of soil attributes (e.g. soil depth, permeability, water
storage)
• Soil attributes are presented for idealised soil profiles that have five
contiguous soil horizons
• A soil profile database of fully characterised sites that are representative of
significant areas and environments
• Estimates of uncertainty for soil attributes to encourage formal analysis of
the uncertainty of predictions generated
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

8. 8 |
Level and
tract name
Mapping
window
Main attributes used for
mapping
Typical uses for the
information
Level 1
Division
30 km Broad physiography
(slope and relief)
Broad geographic context
Level 2
Province
10 km Water balance,
physiography
National natural resource
policy
Level 3
Zone
3 km Substrate lithology,
water balance,
physiography
Regional natural resource
policy
Level 4
District
1 km Groupings of
geomorphically related
systems
Catchment planning, location
of new industries
Level 5
System
300 m Local climate, relief,
slope, lithology,
drainage network, soil
profile class
Catchment management,
hydrological modelling, land
conservation, infrastructure
planning
Level 6
Facet
30 m Slope, aspect, land
curvature, soil profile
class
Farm management, land-use
planning, on-ground works
Level 7
Site
10 m Soil properties, surface
condition, microrelief
Precision agriculture, site
development
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

9. The ASRIS data model (2)
9 |
• The ASRIS five layer model
• Each idealized soil profile is represented by five contiguous soil layers. The layers
are intended to discriminate materials in terms of their functional behaviour.
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

10. ASRIS attribution
10 |
A consistent set of land qualities or attributes is described for
land-unit tracts at levels 3-6 . The attributes relate to the intrinsic
capability of land to support various land uses and include:
• Landform – landform pattern, landform element, rock outcrop, drainage
• Chemical properties – pH, organic carbon, EC, exch bases, ESP, CEC
• Physical properties - bulk density, clay content, coarse fragment
• Hydraulic properties – hydraulic conductivity, PAWC
• Australian Soil Classification
Descriptions from the lowest level units feed into summaries at higher levels.
These are displayed in the online maps as area-weighted means.
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

11. June 6th 2013
11 |
Level 3 Level 4 Level 5
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

12. 12 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

13. 13 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier
Contextual Datasets
•Topographic attributes
•Topographic maps
•Land use
•Land cover
•Climate
•Radiometrics

14. 14 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

15. SoilMapp
SoilMapp for iPad enables you to:
• Identify commonly needed soil information for environmental modelling
(i.e. carbon accounting, food security, species distribution)
• learn about the likely soil types on your property
• view maps, photographs, satellite images, tables and graphs of data about
nearby soils
• uncover your soil’s physical and chemical characteristics, including acidity
(pH), soil carbon, available water storage, salinity and erodibility
• get soil information to put into the farm computer model APSIM, a model
that can help with management decisions on crops and project likely crop
yields
• access the app anywhere there is wireless or internet connection to your
iPad.
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier15 |

16. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier16 |

17. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier17 |

18. National Soil Grids
18 |
Standard data products for environmental modelling
• Identify commonly needed soil information for environmental modelling
(i.e. carbon accounting, food security, species distribution)
• Use the best available soil information
• First products: Clay content 0-30cm, Bulk Density 0-30cm, Plant available
water capacity 0-1m, pH 0-30cm, Australian Soil Classification
Challenges
• The data contains between 1-5 depth layers of varying thickness and some
layers may be missing
• Data comes from several data sources
• Flexible methodology to be able to deliver different depth slices (i.e.
GlobalSoilMap.net 0-5, 5-15, 15-30, 30-60, 60-100, 100-200cm intervals)
Datasets available from ASRIS Themes http://www.asris.csiro.au/themes.html
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

19. 19 |
Conventional
Mapping
Grid/raster
90m cells
Rasterization
Soil profile data
-variable intervals
-missing data
Fit spline
Depth spline
function
1 cm intervals
Standard
depth
mean
Standard depths
Attach to grid
Re-fit
spline
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

20. 20 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

21. 21 | The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

22. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier22 |
• Aspect
• MrVBF
• Plan and profile curvature
• Slope (percent and degrees)
• Median slope over 300 m radius circle
• Relief (elevation range) over 300 m and 1000 m radius circle
• Slope-relief classification
• Topographic position index
• Contributing area
• Topographic wetness index
• Cell area (varies with latitude due to geographic projection)
Terrain Derivatives

23. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier23 |
Slope
(%)
Relief
(300 m radius)

24. The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier24 |
Data Format and Access
• Terrain derivatives are in ESRI grid format
• 1 second resolution datasets are available only as 1x1 degree tiles
• 3 second datasets are available as 1x1 degree tiles and as an
Australia-wide mosaic in an ESRI file geodatabase
• 3 second datasets available via the Data Access Portal
https://data.csiro.au/dap

25. CSIRO National Soil Archive
25 |
Soil specimens
• 71,000 specimens housed in Canberra
• 9,500 sites across Australia
• Mainly collected for soil research
Soil Data
• Relational database contain site descriptions, soil morphology and soil
chemistry
• Approximately 650,000 laboratory measurements
• Many sites have detailed chemistry, micromorphology, soil physics and/or
mineralogy
The Australian Collaborative Land Evaluation Program | David Jacquier

26. LAND AND WATER
Thank you