Convert Horizon Boundary Topography to Vertical Offset

This function will convert USDA-NCSS horizon boundary topography codes into a vertical offset, suitable for use in plotSPC. Default values are reasonable starting points for encoding smooth, wavy, irregular, or broken style horizon boundary topography as defined in Field Book for Describing and Sampling Soils, version 3.0.

Usage

hzTopographyCodeToOffset(
  x,
  codes = c("smooth", "wavy", "irregular", "broken"),
  offset = c(0, 4, 8, 12)
)

Arguments

x: vector of boundary topography codes to be converted
codes: character vector of topography terms ('smooth') or codes ('S'), case insensitive, see details
offset: vertical offset (depth units) used to create "chevron" effect

Value

vector of vertical offsets with same length as x

Details

Additional examples are available in the Visualization of Horizon Boundaries tutorial. Missing data in x (NA) or codes that are not defined in codes are returned with an offset of 0.

Either format (or mixture) are accepted, case insensitive:

terms: c('smooth', 'wavy', 'irregular', 'broken')
coded values: c('s', 'w', 'i', 'b')

References

Field Book for Describing and Sampling Soils, version 3.0

Author

D.E. Beaudette