The Agricultural Region of Alberta Soil Inventory Database (AGRASID) was created by a collaboration involving the Alberta Research Council, Alberta Agriculture Food and Rural Development, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada - Land Resource Unit, and private sector consulting firms (https://www.alberta.ca/agricultural-regions-of-alberta-soil-inventory-database.aspx). AGRASID consists of seamless GIS coverages and relational data files that describe the soil landscapes for agricultural areas of Alberta. The AGRASID soil landscape polygons and attribute data were compiled at a scale of 1:100,000.

To enhance AGRASID for some counties in southern Alberta, the Government of Alberta created a soil polygon layer that has less detail, but higher spatial resolution (scale 1:50,000 for GOA higher resolution layer (unpublished information) versus 1:100,000 for AGRASID). The higher resolution information was interpreted based on remote sensed images with little or no ground truthing.

ABMI created a simplified GIS polygon layer to describe general soil characteristics throughout the Grassland, Parkland and Dry Mixedwood regions of Alberta. Based on soil name and soil correlation area from AGRASID, ABMI classified polygons to the 24 natural soil types used by GVI (see table in this document). The crosswalks used to convert AGRASID information to GVI soil type are described in Excel tables (Grassland, Parkland, Dry Mixedwood ). For the counties with higher resolution information, that information rather than ARGASID information, was used to create the ABMI soil layer.

Only natural soil types were included In the ABMI’s soil layer. For polygons where natural soil type was missing, ABMI used historical information where possible (McNeil 2014). When historical information was not available ABMI used topography soil information from the surrounding area to assign natural soil types. The GIS soil layer and associated metadata created by ABMI can be downloaded.