The AQP family of R packages has seen a lot of development over the last 3 months. Some of the highlights include:

1. HTML manual pages with syntax-highlighting and figures, c/o knitr
2. new vignettes: "dealing with bad data", gridded SSURGO (gSSURGO) demo, and "aggregating properties by bedrock kind"
3. a new package called sharpshootR containing misc. functions to support soil survey
4. slab() has been re-written and is now much more efficient (with memory), transparent (10x fewer lines of code), and "slab functions" are much simpler to write.

New Label Style!

Some recent updates to SoilWeb. New visualizations will be incorporated into SoilWeb soon.

Something fun to play with before the new year: experimental code in aqp for simulating soil profile data from a single "template" profile. The basic idea: simulate horizon thickness data using a family of Gaussian functions with mean defined by horizon thickness values found in the template and standard deviation defined by the user. Larger hz.sd values will yield more drastic variation in the simulated results. Note that only "horizonation" (e.g. the sequence of horizons and their respective thickness) is simulated; horizon attributes (e.g. texture, pH, etc.) are copied from the "template" profile.

Basic usage is demonstrated below, see package manual page for details. This function is only available in the version of aqp hosted by R-Forge. It should be on CRAN by the new year.

Simulated Profiles

A fun kick-starter for anyone interested in working with soil profile data in R, via AQP. See in-line comments for details. Up next, profile slicing and aggregation.

Continuing the previous discussion of pair-wise dissimilarity between soil profiles, the following demonstration (code, comments, and figures) further elaborates on the method. A more in-depth discussion of this example will be included as a vignette within the 1.0 release of AQP.

Profile Dissimilarity Demo: MVO Soils