SOIL CLASSIFICATION OF SEATTLE, SHORELINE, AND WHITE CENTER AREAS OF KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON

Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE
SEATTLE,WA 98195

Performing Department
ECOSYSTEM SCIENCES

Non Technical Summary
Classification of soil in urban areas is important for urban and regional governments in making transportation and other management decisions. The project will complete the soil classification of Seattle, Shoreline, and White Center urban areas of central Puget Sound in King County, Washington.

Animal Health Component

100%

Research Effort Categories

Basic

(N/A)

Applied

100%

Developmental

(N/A)

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
101	0110	2090	100%

Knowledge Area
101 - Appraisal of Soil Resources;

Subject Of Investigation
0110 - Soil;

Field Of Science
2090 - Statistics, econometrics, and biometrics;

Goals / Objectives
The project will classify, map, and interpret the soils and topography of the Seattle, Shoreline, and White Center areas of King County, Washington. The project is in support of a Cultural Resource Protection Project (CRPP). The final project will include hard copies of maps, digital ArcView shapefiles, and ArcInfo coverages in State Plane projections consistent with King County protocol and FGDC metadata standards. Annotations for the soil and spatial databases for this project will be with INFO and Dbase file tabular format.

Project Methods
Map layers will include polygon coverags of soil series and slope classifications. Slopes will be classified with USGS 10 meter Digital Elevational Models. Soils will be defined from surficial geology and from field experiences and studies.

Progress 04/01/01 to 02/25/03

Outputs
The vendor (King County Roads Department, Archeological Division) requested that a the 4 existing soil series partial polygon coverages be merged into one coverage suitable for overlaying with potential Native American settlement point coverages. It is anticipated that the soils will be related to early human settlements because of a known correlation between solar insolation and soil type. The product requested was a topological geographic information systems ArcINFO compatible coverage of soil series of King County, Washington State. To accomplish this objective we first created a soil series coverage (see Soil Classification I) for the northwest portion of King County. This was then attached to the other partial soils coverages of King County. Nomenclature was consolidated for the more than 14,000 soil polygons created and redundant polygons were dissolved (e.g., soil series with the same names that were adjacent to one another, but on different partial coverages) were collapsed from 2 to 1 polygon. A draft digital product was presented to Fennelle Miller of the King County Roads Department. It was tested for completeness, suitability and functionality. After these tests the product was developed and transferred to the County. The product is also available on our website for download as an ArcINFO interchange format (.e00) file.

Impacts
We expect this product to be used by the King County Roads Department for determining the likelihood of pre-historical Native American settlements along proposed road construction and enhancement projects. The project can easily be overlaid with geology maps and provide an initial probability of road bed stability in the planning stage of road development. The map will be useful to students in land use and soil classification classes at U.W. We have worked on applying the product to a virtual Puget Sound (PRISM) model. We received some seed (salary) money to investigate the feasibility of our method to this research group and are currently awaiting input from other labs so that our approach can be appraised

Publications

Adams, A.B., R.B. Harrison. 2002. Digital GIS soil series coverage of King County Washington. Available online at http://soilslab.cfr.washington.edu/carbon_and_soils