Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Cryosol Databases
14.1
Database Development
Soil databases are collections of soil information organized in systematic form in an
electronic environment. They include both spatial databases, which contain soil
information that can be displayed as soil maps, and point databases, which contain
morphological, physical and chemical data for a pedon at a specifi c location. In
addition, numerous soil databases contain monitored data on soil temperatures, soil
moisture, and active and thaw layer depths. Since the soil databases are in an elec-
tronic form, they are very useful for various interpretations, scaling up information
such as carbon concentrations and carbon stocks, and providing basic information
for modeling.
At the present time there are spatial databases for cryosols in Canada (Agriculture
and Agri-Food Canada
2014a
), the USA (Soil Survey Division
2014a
), Russia
(Fridland
1988
), Greenland (Jakobsen and Eiby
1997
). These spatial databases
present information at scales of 1:1,000,000-1:2,000,000 (small-scale databases).
One of the most comprehensive spatial databases is the Northern and Mid Latitude
Soil Database (European Union, Joint Research Centre
2014
). This database, which
is also a small-scale database, contains soil information for North America,
Greenland, Europe and the northern part of Asia. Unfortunately, there are very few
large-scale spatial soil databases available for permafrost areas.
Currently, no pedon database (a point database) has been developed specifi cally
for cryosols. Databases such as the U.S. and Canadian pedon databases (Soil Survey
Division
2014b
; Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
2014b
) contain pedons of cryo-
sols, but the number of such pedons is very small. A summary of cryosol databases
is given in Table
14.1
.
