News Release

A new GIS tool that helps better protect post-fire landscapes has been developed by Penn State University and the USDA Forest Service. The tool simply extracts the most pertinent soil properties from the USDA-NRCS Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database, and combines that information with satellite derived fire burn severity data to help locate areas with the highest priority for field investigation and treatment. The application is described in the Summer 2010 issue of Soil Survey Horizons, a publication of the Soil Science Society of America.

The tool was developed by the Forest Service’s Jonna DuShey in response to the frustration she and her fellow soil scientists encountered when working on Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams. Manipulating and querying large complex databases under the stress of emergency response required time that could better be used in the field. DuShey worked with her Penn State academic advisors Drohan and Miller, during her master of geographic information systems (MGIS) degree, to create a simple set of tools that could be distributed to BAER teams and used with very little training.

“What we found,” says DuShey, “is that soil scientists understood the data and how to use it, but often lacked the expertise with GIS software to use it efficiently. GIS specialists could easily query and manipulate the data but had little understanding of the complex nature of soil surveys. The tool helps bridge that gap for both groups of people.”

The tool takes standardized datasets from NRCS and the Forest Service and pares the information down to the fire location and the specific data that can be used for rating the erosion hazard of the area. Using the tool, information such as surface texture and depth, that used to take hours to piece together on large fires, can now be available to in a matter of minutes and combined with the areas of highest burn severity for immediate evaluation by soil scientists and other members of the response team.