Soil types in DAS

There are three primary soil classification systems in use in Australia, these being Great Soil Groups, Principal Profile Forms and the Aust. Soil Classification System. As such, most soil maps ever produced have tended to use one of these classifications systems. These classification systems are highly technical and need an expert level of soils knowledge to understand them making it difficult for a non-technical user to derive much useful information from these maps. 

To overcome this issue, we decided to adopt a more generalised soil classification system, which CSIRO call the “Generic Soil Groups”. This is designed to group soils into functional groups that are easier to understand to a general user whilst still being useful at a technical level. The soil types groups have similar hydrologic properties and designed to be relevant for a range of soil water/crop modelling applications grouped based on their hydrologic properties with the designed to be relevant for a range of soil water/crop modelling applications. 

The soil data in DAS is built on a model which has used 240k soil sites from the National Soil Site Collation in combination with machine learning to predict with 60%+ accuracy the soil types which make up a property. The resultant product is a grid of 90m pixels across the whole of the nation with estimates of the probability of each pixel belonging to a particular soil group. The map displayed is that of the most probable soil group for each pixel.
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The different soil groups identified by CSIRO are as follows:

In DAS we include some subcategories of these. The ID below will match the subcategories identified in DAS to the groups prepared by CSIRO.

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