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NOTICE: The SoilWeb snapshot of the RaCA data has been deprecated. The latest version of the data, including values measured by the Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory, and supporting documentation, are available here: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/resources/data-and-reports/rapid-carbon-assessment-raca. Download link on National Agricultural Library Ag Data Commons: https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/rapid-carbon-assessment-raca

Get Rapid Carbon Assessment (RaCA) data by state, geographic bounding-box, RaCA site ID, or soil series query from the SoilWeb API. This interface to the data was an experimental delivery service that does not include the latest soil organic carbon (SOC) measurements.

Please use current RaCA distribution if you need lab measured SOC rather than SOC estimated by VNIR.

This interface will be updated sometime calendar year 2022 to include the latest soil morphology, taxonomic classification, and measured SOC values. More detailed coordinates for sample sites should also be available.

Usage

fetchRaCA(
  series = NULL,
  bbox = NULL,
  state = NULL,
  rcasiteid = NULL,
  get.vnir = FALSE
)

Arguments

series

a soil series name; case-insensitive

bbox

a bounding box in WGS84 geographic coordinates e.g. c(-120, 37, -122, 38), constrained to a 5-degree block

state

a two-letter US state abbreviation; case-insensitive

rcasiteid

a RaCA site id (e.g. 'C1609C01')

get.vnir

logical, should associated VNIR spectra be downloaded? (see details)

Value

pedons:

a SoilProfileCollection object containing site/pedon/horizon data

trees:

a data.frame object containing tree DBH and height

veg:

a data.frame object containing plant species

stock:

a data.frame object containing carbon quantities (stocks) at standardized depths

sample:

a data.frame object containing sample-level bulk density and soil organic carbon values

spectra:

a numeric matrix containing VNIR reflectance spectra from 350--2500 nm

Details

The VNIR spectra associated with RaCA data are quite large (each gzip-compressed VNIR spectra record is about 6.6kb), so requests for these data are disabled by default. Note that VNIR spectra can only be queried by soil series or geographic BBOX.

See also

Author

D.E. Beaudette, USDA-NRCS staff