1 Topic by Darwyn Sumner

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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  • From: Dipterists Forum
  • Registered: 10-05-2006
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Topic: National Soil Map

Located at http://www.landis.org.uk/soilscapes/
The site says it's developed by Cranfield University and sponsored by DEFRA so I'm not sure to what extent it represents UK government data.
I just tried to get hold of a GIS layer to attempt to calculate and display an association with the distribution of a dipteran species (relying on Broom we think).
It's the sort of data that could be very useful to botanists or as an overlay on NBN Gateway maps.
No luck, they charge an admin fee of £375
Do any of our agency friends have this or anything similar so that we naturalists who make all our stuff available free of charge are not billed by Universities (or government if it's theirs)
Back on the "Free our data" and "Open Access publishing" trail again - sigh

2 Reply by charliebarnes

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Re: National Soil Map

Just some other sources I've come across:

Worldwide: ISRIC SoilGrids 1km: http://soilgrids.org/

Scotland: http://www.soils-scotland.gov.uk/

It's not soils, but the BGS do open 1:625 000 bedrock & superficial: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/products/digitalmaps/dataInfo.html

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

charliebarnes's Website

3 Reply by Darwyn Sumner

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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Re: National Soil Map

Thanks Charlie, those are interesting sites, especially the Scottish one.
I've had a further reply from Caroline Keay at Cranfield University, apparently I can use a WMS feed for free in QGIS, never tried this sort of thing before in GIS so expect cries for help at some point.

P.S. I wonder if our other GIS addicted friends Charles and Teresa still look out for these threads now they've both moved on to new pastures?

4 Reply by BDeed

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Re: National Soil Map

Hi Darwyn, QGIS is pretty awesome. If you're making use of a soils plugin or wms and want to do some comparison you might also want to consider the tom.bio plugin which allows you to access and download data via the NBN Gateway straight into QGIS.

Natural History & Biodiversity Data Enthusiast

5 Reply by Darwyn Sumner

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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Re: National Soil Map

Thanks Ben. Yes, it beats the pants off the version of MapInfo I was using back in my LERC days.
I've done a bit of tinkering but nothing as serious as LERC jobs yet. At the moment I'm just trying to put together some snappy maps for an article I'm writing on a taxon from my Recording Scheme. Recorder 6 screen grabs are OK for quick jobs but I'm awed by the quality of stuff people are producing in British Wildlife or the maps that Laurence Clemons produced using MS Access and (I guess) DMap at http://www.dipteristsforum.org.uk/t4696 … eland.html - most impressed by the way he's been able to stick with MSAccess, all mine got engulfed by Windows updates and changes to MSAccess (I guess I wrote too much VB into them).
Got a good start with VC maps, grid tiles down to 1k squares and all the other free goodies that are kicking around these days.
That soilscapes WMS feed is eluding me at the moment, they are easy to link from QGIS and I've clearly partially succeeded as the metadata and thumbnail show up but no image yet, maybe it just takes ages to upload.
That plugin sounds useful, my data's better than theirs at the moment (oops another job) so I'm working from R6 output into a spreadsheet then tab file then imported as a non-mapped table into QGIS and so on (you'd want something slicker if you were dealing with many taxa)
Nice to have the full Adobe suite, pdf files output from GIS are vector graphics so they drop nicely into InDesign after a bit of work in Illustrator - but that all comes later.