Oden Island: A Piece of Pure Michigan

 

 

  While completely unrelated, my first impression of the NRCS Web Soil Survey was that the interface reminded me of the accounting Cisco platform used at my old agency about ten years ago. I recognized many of the icons and the expand/contract features, and the function of generating excel file reports was the same. I remember at the time feeling that accounting platform was a bit antiquated so went into this assignment with that assumption. However, my experience with this platform was much more positive! I appreciated the fact the tool provided correction / trouble shooting prompts to me throughout my exploration. For example, at first I didn't correctly select my area of interest (AOI) and when I tried to click the Soil Map tab, received an error message with instructions of how to correctly navigate.  With this error message prompt, I quickly understood how to select my AOI, as shown here.  From there, I was able to generate a soil map of my AOI, and the corresponding map legen