| Question | Answer |
| When will Web Soil Survey have soil information for my particular county? | All data available in Web Soil Survey is stored in the NRCS Soil Data Mart. Each state is responsible for populating the Soil Data Mart for all counties in that state. For information about when data will be available for your county, contact your State Soil Scientist. This link is also available from the Contact Us link. |
| Is there a way to access the soils data using ArcMap? |
There is no direct way to access data from Web Soil Survey using ArcMap. However, once you have defined an area of interest, you can download the soil data for the entire soil survey area for use with ArcMap. To do so, click the Download Soil Data link in the navigation bar at the top of the Web Soil Survey page. Alternatively, you can use the Soil Data Viewer application with the soils data downloaded and stored locally for use in ArcGIS. |
| Question | Answer |
| Why am I limited to an area of interest of 10,000 or fewer acres? Will this limit be removed at some point? | For performance purposes, in release 2.0 of Web Soil Survey, a restriction is required on the size of the AOI. This will likely be removed in a future release. |
| Can I use 911 addresses (physical address on county roads) in the address search feature? | This feature is not supported in the current release. |
| How can I bookmark or save my AOI so I can come back to it? | Currently, you cannot save an area of interest (AOI) that you define. The ability to save the AOI is planned for a future release of Web Soil Survey. |
| My land contains more than one irregular-shaped field area of tillable land that is surrounded by non-tillable land. Is it possible to draw each area of tillable land as separate sub-parts of the AOI so the software can summarize each soil type from the total of field areas of tillable land that has been sketched? | This feature is not currently available. A future release of Web Soil Survey will provide the ability to create a compound AOI. |
| When I’m drawing an AOI, sometimes I make an error and want to stop in the middle of drawing it and start over, or after I’ve drawn it, I want to delete the AOI and start over. Is there a way to do this? | To stop in the middle of drawing an AOI and start over, when using the AOI Polygon tool, just press the Esc key. When using the AOI Rectangle tool, press the Esc key without releasing the mouse button. To delete an AOI after drawing it, click the Clear AOI button in the Area of Interest Properties panel. |
| Question | Answer |
| The aerial photos are too dark or look like patchwork. Is there anything I can do to make this more readable? | There is no setting that can be adjusted when the orthophotos are difficult to read. |
| Why are the water and road lines so far off the photo image? | The base map data layers used by Web Soil Survey come from multiple sources and were compiled at different scales. No Workaround. The development staff is working to correct the problem. |
| How can I find the date of aerial photography used in Web Soil Survey? |
To get the date of the aerial photography, click the Identify tool on the map tool bar; open the Layers tab; set the “Aerial Photography” background layer as the active layer, by clicking the layer name (leave the checkbox checked, and just click the name “Aerial Photography”); then click on the map. In the Identify Results panel below the map, you will see the date that the aerial photo you clicked was made. The aerial photography date(s) are also included on the Legend page of the printable map. |
| Question | Answer |
| On screen, the map comes up perfectly, but when I print the page, there is a white rectangular box covering the top left corner of the map (2 15/16" wide × 1 11/16" long). | This seems to be a printer driver problem. Try printing to a different printer, or updating the printer driver. |