Wednesday, November 15, 2006
292-6

Impact of Inaccuracies in Soil Maps and Terrain Models on Land-Use and Management Decisions.

Adam Pike, Thomas Mueller, Barry Kew, Tasos Karathanasis, and Blazan Mijatovic. Univ of Kentucky, Pssb-n-122 Ag Science Center, Lexington, KY 40546

The quality of spatial land-use information can affect the efficacy of planning and management decisions.  The objective of this study was to determine how these decisions would be impacted by inaccuracies in terrain models and soil surveys.  First order soil surveys were created for three fields in Kentucky. For two other Kentucky fields, terrain attributes were derived from DEMs created with elevation data obtained from real-time kinematics (RTK) global positioning system (GPS) measurements and extracted from USGS DEMs. The analyses demonstrated how imprecision in DEM and soil survey data could impact land use decisions.