Rhode Island Historic Pedon Descriptions
During the course of a soil survey a wealth of information and data is recorded about the soils occurring in the survey area. Data such as laboratory analysis, water table elevations, climate, woodland and crop yields, and basic soil profile descriptions. This data is generally kept on file and some of it get incorporated into the published soil survey report but unfortunately most of it is never made available to the users or the scientific community. NeSoil.com is working to make this data available on the web and is working to convert historic paper copies of archived data. Below are Adobe PDF copies of all of the soil pedon descriptions that were made during the mapping and data collection for the Soil Survey of Rhode Island (1981). The pedons were described between the periods 1959 through 1977. Profile descriptions in older soil surveys were recorded on small blue description cards (SCS Form 232) with minimal profile data (horizon, color, texture, structure, pH, etc.) and filed in a folder with other pedon descriptions of the same series. Most of the descriptions were made using the old system for horizon designation in order to convert the old system to the new reefer to the conversion sheets below.

Page left is the master horizon nomenclature conversion Page right is the horizon suffixes conversion Special thanks to Michelle Marasco, RI NRCS Soil Scientist Intern for converting these documents to PDF. Check back soon for a GIS file that will show the general (pre-GPS) locations of these pedons.

Below are links to the PDF ( ) historic pedon descriptions (most less than 2 MB each)

Example of Historic Pedon Description