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SOIL SUITABILITY FOR SEPTIC SYSTEMS |
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JUSTIFICATION FOR USE: |
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Our main task as a group was to identify areas that were most suitable for accommodating future growth and development. That being the case our next step was to identify which soils present in the three county area were more or less suitable for supporting septic systems. This information layer was one of several that related to identifying "appropriate" development areas. |
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PROCESS |
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This information layer was available to us in a digital format for Columbia and Union Counties from the Florida Geographic Data Library (FGDL). While we got the data from FGDL, it is important to note they were not the creators of this information layer. The information was originally gathered and analyzed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and was originally presented in the Soil Surveys that they publish for each county. The information was digitized from these sources into the coverages that we used. For Suwannee County we had to create the coverage ourselves from another coverage, and again we based our coverage on information obtained from the Suwannee County Soil Survey. This information layer, or coverage, contained many different pieces of information, or fields, which we could analyze or display on the computer. One of the fields contained an overall, relative ranking of the appropriateness of the particular soil type for septic systems. This field originally contained a gradient of values that ranged from "poor" to "excellent". We reclassified all of these values into one of three categories: |
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This classification format was used for all of the different information layers that our group created and analyzed. The reclassification was done so as to maximize the relative differences in susceptibility of each area. In other words, all of the category "1" areas have similar characteristics and are significantly different from the other two categories. The same holds for each of the other two categories as well. |
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RESULTS |
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The result of our reclassification is a map that shows the three county area with each of the resultant three classifications which we created shaded a different color. This map then became one of many different information layers that were weighted and combined to give us our Residential and Commercial Intermediate Suitability Maps. |
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| Soils suitable for septic systems | |||
