Island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago

Source

Eras: Modern era
Concepts: environmentagriculturewetlands
Within: Beaver Island archipelago

Summary

A derived dataset that joins held SSURGO soil map units to the named islands of the archipelago, so soil descriptions can be read island by island. It covers Beaver, Garden, High, Hog, Whiskey, North Fox, and South Fox islands, drawing on survey areas MI029 (Charlevoix County) and MI089 (Leelanau County), with the 1974 USDA Charlevoix County soil survey supplying the narrative descriptions of each map unit. The USDA-SSURGO wildlife crosswalk adds a separate, cautious join from these map units to historical habitat-suitability rows. The component tables now resolve many apparent Fox Island name candidates to specific series and representative percentages. The separate wildlife crosswalk keeps those component links distinct from whole-map-unit ratings.

Evidence and limits

This is a research product, not a determination. The dataset states its own limits plainly: SSURGO map-unit polygons and OpenStreetMap island boundaries are planning and research layers, not field-verified parcel determinations or legal boundaries, and intersected areas are computed from the held polygon extract rather than surveyed on the ground.

It establishes which soil map units fall within an island’s mapped outline. It does not establish soil conditions at any particular location, and it should not be used to characterise a specific parcel.

Open questions

How do the crosswalk’s island-level soil groupings compare with the natural community types mapped in the 2017 MNFI surveys?
Do the 1974 survey’s map-unit descriptions still match current conditions on the islands that have seen the most land-cover change?

Sources

Project-generated island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago.
Generated by scripts/build_ssurgo_island_soil_crosswalk.py. Intersects held SSURGO map-unit polygon extracts for survey areas MI029 (Charlevoix County) and MI089 (Leelanau County) with named OSM island geometries, covering Beaver, Garden, High, Hog, Whiskey, North Fox, and South Fox islands. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
soils · ssurgo_island_soil_ecology_crosswalk
USDA Soil Conservation Service, Soil Survey of Charlevoix County, Michigan (1974), text extraction.
Narrative anchor for the crosswalk's map-unit descriptions. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
geology · publications · usda_1974_charlevoix_soil_survey_ocr
SSURGO map-unit polygon extracts, survey areas MI029 and MI089.
The polygon source intersected against island geometry.
soils · ssurgo_mapunit_polygons
OpenStreetMap contributors, island polygons via Overpass API (ODbL 1.0).
Island boundaries used for the intersection.
osm · islands

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “Island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/ssurgo-archipelago-soils-crosswalk/, accessed [date], citing Project-generated island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago. (and 3 further sources listed on the page).

Last revised 2026-08-03. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

BibTeX for “Island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago”RIS for “Island-scale SSURGO soil crosswalk for the Beaver archipelago”