MLRA REGION 10 NEWSLETTER--JANUARY 1, 2000 NASIS DEVELOPMENT PRIORITIES FOR FY 2000 The Information Technology staffs at Ft. Collins and Lincoln plan to program and test the following in Fiscal Year 2000, dependant upon the final budget allocation. The first ten items are planned to be bundled into the NASIS 5.0 release. 1. Provide for a central server for all NASIS data. 2. Complete Windows PEDON (work of t. Reinsch). 3. Imporve delivery os soil data via the Internet. 4. Enhancements to the download of soil data for the Service Centers. 5. Enhance PEDON reports within NASIS. 6. Convert STATSGO tabular data to NASIS. 7. Incorporate the Lab data model into NASIS. 8. Import Lab data into NASIS. 9. Add taxonomy as a user managed domain. 10. Soil Survey Manuscript Automation. 11. Point/site data collection tool (inculdes import into NASIS). 12. OSD & S-5 databases: use existing data in creating a National Standard database in NASIS. 13. More custom national reports. 14. Run multiple reports at a time. 15. Compute additional elements (T, k, sieves, AASHTO, Unified, etc.) 16. Generic export: FGDC format. 17. Integrate SSURGO Spatial and NASIS Attribute Data. ######################################################################### DON'T GET HACKED Firewalls, protective envelopes, fences, guard dogs - it does not make any difference what type of security you have, sooner or later some hacker will try to break into your computer system. Government systems are not immune. In fact, Federal computer systems are a favorite target. Because of the connectivity of NRCS systems, a hacker who compromises one system would commonly have access to many systems. According to Dwight Holman, Deputy chief for Management, attempts by hackers to breach NRCS computer systems are increasing at an alarming rate. Steps are in place to reduce the chance of unauthorized access to the HP-UX system used to maintain NASIS. Recently, access to the HP-UX system at the MLRA-15 office was restricted. Users may find that they cannot log into the system, even if they could just a day before. This may cause a temporary inconvenience, but the added security will help protect system integrity. [Similar steps were taken in MLRA Region 10; if you find you cannot access NASIS, call John Handler at (651) 602-7894, Rich Dougherty at (651) 602-7904, or Cathy McCormack at (651) 602-7906.] While system administrator can do many things to deter hackers, users must also help safeguard the system. Helping to maintain security can be easy as changing your password every thirty days and not telling anyone your password. Passwords must be at least six characters long and must be a mix of numbers and letters. And remember, taping passwords to your monitor is not considered good etiquette. Contributed by Rick Zellmer, GIS Specialist, Auburn, AL ######################################################################### QUOTE "A soil is not a pile of dirt. It is a transformer, a body that organizes raw materials into tissue. These are the tissues that become the mother to all organic life." -- William Bryant Logan, Dirt, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. ######################################################################### JANUARY IS NATIONAL EYE CARE MONTH Hope everyone is seeing their way through last month's credit card charges! Soil scientists are really tough on their eyes--from the physical dangers of being in the field during the mapping season to the strain of using stereoscopes and light tables and computer screens during the winter season. We really ask our eyes to do a lot of various tasks for us. Consider the impact on your career (and lifestyle) if one or both of your eyes were impared or lost. Many eye diseases can be avoided or cured if caught in an early stage, and most other malfunctions can be corrected. Be good to yourself and your eyes and make the time to visit your eyecare professional this month (and avoid having to do it during the field season). ######################################################################### SOIL PIT AT FARM PROGRESS DAYS Farm Progress Days was held in Grant County [Wisconsin] last July. The Wisconsin Soiciety of Professional Soil Scientists (WSPSS) was proud to be a part of the Soil Pit display. Attendance is in the tens of thousands and there are hundreds of tents, displays, shows and vendors to keep a person busy for entire day. With each passing year "the pit" has attracted well over 2000 visitors representing all ages and interest. For the seventh year the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Safety and Building Division (S&B) and WSPSS have worked together to construct the soil pit. The pit was large and U- shaped and wide. A large colored professionally made soil map of the immediate area greets the visitor at the entrance. NRCS, WSPSS, and S&B personnel were on hand to answer questions. The individual displays within the pit this year consisted of a "Soil Regions of Wisconsin" miniature display: a hands-on "Estimate the texture of your Soil" table, complete with samples of known textures and including our new large green Textural Triangle. Four different miniature on-site waste disposal systems, a bedrock display, several full monoliths from the area, Howard [Gundlach]'s new "Soil Profile Cookies" and an animal waste storage facility display were also shown. As in the past, information cards pointing out the various soil properties and soil limitations were found throughout the walls of the pit. A local contractor donated the backhoe time. Our thanks goes to all individuals, who helped plan, set up, maintain and tear down the display this year. YOU ARE THE REASON FOR ITS SUCCESS. Hopefully, those visiting the soil pit took home a better appreciation of the role of soils in rural living and agriculture. Next year's Farm Progress Days will be held in Fond du Lac County, July 11- 13, 2000. From: Wisconsin Society of Professional Soil Scientists newsletter ######################################################################### NASIS 4.1 SUCCESSFULLY INSTALLED NASIS 4.0 was upgraded to NASIS 4.1 at all sites in the country on December 1-4. The most obvious enhancements NASIS users will notice are available by clicking on: File - Export - NASIS Format: This export is more complete than the FOCS and SSURGO Formats, and includes NASIS generated interpretations. View - Distributions: A new set of tables that record each export and what data were in the export. Options - NASIS Preferences: User preferences on displayed rows, choice list items, displayed dialog boxes and images, and text editors. Additional enhancements can be obtained from the MLRA Region 10 web site (http://www.mn.nrcs.usda.gov/mo10/mo10.html); click on "National Soil Information System (NASIS)". ######################################################################### NASIS 4.1 REPORT MANAGER BUG A bug in the NASIS Report Manager window has surfaced. This window is the one that appears on screen when a NASIS user clicks on Options - Standard Reports; the user can then choose a report and run it. The bug results in an icon (not a full window) appearing on screen. This icon cannot be maximized into the full Report Manager window. This bug is believed to be caused by an inconsistency between the new NASIS 4.1 software and certain versions of Exceed (Hummingbird). The following fix is provided by Henry Ferguson and Tammy Cheever: ----- There is a file called .Xdefaults in your home directory. If the following lines are added to the end of the file, they will fix your problem: NASIS*reportSelForm.width: 1000 NASIS*reportSelForm.height: 400 ----- One other way of fixing the problem is to copy another user's .Xdefaults file (after that user has added the two lines, of course). Be aware though that you will also end up with that user's other NASIS screen parameters, like font sizes and background colors. Contributed by John Handler ######################################################################### SOIL PIT A HIT NRCS Soil Scientist Donald Parizek's exhibit was an underground sensation for inner city kids at the annual Springside Farm Festival held in New Haven, Connecticut. Donald's soil pit was a big hit, along with aerial photographs, clay dogs, make-your-own soil profiles, and auger demonstration. Hundreds of visitors stopped by to look, smell, and touch the soil samples. Springside Farm is located in the heart of New Haven and gives inner city kids a place to go to learn about raising plants and animals. For more information, contact Donald at From: NRCS This Week ######################################################################### MANAGING YOUR PC 1. Temp spaces: While performing a couple of field office visits I found that the c:/windows/temp and the c:/temp or c:/tmp directories were getting cluttered. Once these directories had been cleaned out, NASIS ran much more efficiently. In some cases NASIS would stall and the user would get kicked out every 15 minutes or so, prior to cleaning out the temp directories. After this maintenance I was able to log in for several hours at a time and got knocked out only once or twice. You may want to pass this information on to other NASIS users. It is not always the KC connection or the internet traffic causing problems. Your own management of your PC may be interfering with NASIS. I must admit that I personally have stored some files in temp that I should not have. In the future these type of files are being filed in a directory called "junk" so that I do not interfere with NASIS. Please note that the first office that I visited had in excess of 8.0 GB of free space on the hard drive and still had problems because of limited temp space. 2: Memory allocation: The second problem that I found on a couple machines were icons which indicated that automatic processes were taking up RAM. Examples would be cool talk, or some virtual games (which should not be on office machines). On a machine with 256 K of RAM I was running out of memory to run NASIS. By disabling a few of the automatic processes I was able to free up 71% of the RAM. I did not look into the background behind each of the icons since the machine in question was primarily a NASIS machine. If you were running NASIS on a Public Affairs machine which performed other functions, it would be important to check out the additional processes and to make a more educated decision as to which icons to disable or delete. 3. Backups It never hurts to remind everyone to back-up their system. I have observed several machines which have not been backed up for the last several months. In the age of PC's each user is responsible for their own PC. Ask yourself--if I dropped my laptop in a river, or if lightning took out my PC, are there any files that I would have to recreate or is the information backed up safely either on tape, floppy, JAZ drive, or in the NASIS database that someone else is maintaining? If there are any files that meet this criteria, your system is not backed up properly, and you need to take additional precautions against data loss. Contributed by: Henry Ferguson ######################################################################### WOW WOWS CAPITAL KIDS Kids from Washington, D.C., public schools learned about conservation and the outdoor life at the kick-off event of the Wonderful Outdoor World (WOW) program held on the National Capital Mall. Hosted by Federal, State, and local agencies, and private sector partners, including the Walt Disney Corporation, the event featured five learning stations. At the environmental conservation station, NRCS personnel showed their guests how to build their own soil profile and were given coloring books that explained soil and water conservation techniques. From: NRCS This Week ######################################################################### MANAGING YOUR NASIS FILES, DATA, AND TIME NASIS is a great tool. However, legends are the most vulnerable of the elements in NASIS to be destroyed. I highly recommend that every field office print out a copy of the legend and dmu report. You will need this to recreate your legend if it ever were to be deleted by accident. It is also valuable to have a complete hard copy of all the manuscript reports and text note reports. Duplicate effort: I have observed many instances of this. I know many individuals are just getting used to NASIS, but it is very important that we all USE NASIS to its fullest potential. I often see legends in word, spreadsheets of properties in EXCEL, access databases of soil properties, and the like. What does this tell me? The users do not understand the power of queries and reports in NASIS and that they do not trust NASIS. Each project leader and project member should take a good look at each electronic file concerning their subsets. If that individual is getting ready to edit even one line in WORD, EXCEL, or ACCESS they should ask themselves if the file could be maintained in NASIS. Our goal is to capture soils data in a format that will allow all users access to the data and thoughts of the project members. If the notes are important enough to be jotted down on paper, then they are important enough to be summarized in NASIS and inserted as a text note. Notice that I only put down WORD, EXCEL and ACCESS when edits were made to files in these formats. These are excellent tools in which to import data from NASIS and further manipulate it. However, we do not want to edit and maintain these databases outside of NASIS. We want to edit the data in NASIS and then export it to WORD, EXCEL and ACCESS. Contributed by: Henry Ferguson ######################################################################### WOODLAND INTERPRETATIONS As most of you are aware, much of the woodland data converted from SSSD is "hidden" in NASIS and not accessible to edit. We can generate the "old" standard woodland table and edit by hand outside of NASIS. This will provide "current" information for a published report. However, when the NASIS SSURGO "export" is selected for the same survey area the original SSSD data for woodland is downloaded. This data which has not be edited and is different from the data in the published report. Which is the official data set? Both will be released to the public at about the same time. Recently we discussed this issue with Johnny Patterson, Forester, NSSC and his intent is that NASIS 4.1 will not include the "old" woodland information converted from SSSD. Two approaches to deal with this issue in the short-term are as follows: 1. Execute the SSURGO export and then edit the "woodland" and "woodmgt" tables with "vi editor" or "dbe". This will require a lot of extra work. 2. Execute the SSURGO export and delete the obsolete information from the "woodland" and "woodmgt" tables. This is probably the best approach since the NASIS Format export in NASIS 4.1 does this anyway. Is anyone using a different approach for the SSURGO export to issure the woodland data is current? Contributed by: Rick Fielder SDQS, MO16 Little Rock ######################################################################### STATUS OF MAP UNIT GENERATOR (MUG) SOFTWARE IN MO-11 MUG is coming along well. Bill is testing MUG in Michigan and is very pleased with the management statements that he has created. Rich is reviewing MUG in Ohio and is presenting it to field staff. I am still in the middle of working on the landform position statements. Much progress has been made recentlyand a test product is ready. A test water features table is complete. This finishes the first round of Manuscript Ready Reports for MO-ll. These reports are similar to the National reports with the following exceptions. 1. Some columns have been deleted and others added to tailor the reports to our region. As an example, all references to range land have been deleted. 2. Only one heading per table. (To eliminate the need for editors to delete the headings before page layout.) 3. SECASE has been dropped in preference to Actual case. This eliminates the McAdoo McGary Adco-Mexico problems which would be printed out as Mcadoo, Mcgary, and Adco-mexico if SECASE was used. 4. Padding ------ has been added where appropriate. 5. Punctuation such as .'s and ,'s have been added where necessary. 6. The columns were adjusted to make all pages portrait using our font formats. 7. Sample woodland reports have been generated using the interpretations generator. We have one report that only lists trees and productivity and no interps. We have one report that lists only interps and no productivity. We have one report that lists a couple of interps and productivity. 8. We have a couple of fixed crop reports that print out specified crop yields and allow sorting of columns based on the sequence of the first component yields in the table. Using this example one report prints out corn, soybeans, winter wheat, grass-legume hay, and pasture. If the 5 crops are given sequence numbers 1-5 then the columns appear in the order just listed. If the sequence column is left blank the columns are sorted alphabetically by crop name. Contributed by: Henry Ferguson ######################################################################### WEB SITES OF INTEREST http://www.usda.gov/news/usdakids/index.html USDA for Kids home page. ######################################################################### Last month, the following x3780 files were sent to offices having SSSD: x3780.405frig on Dec 03 (10 updated OSDs) @ @ Sent to offices using soils in the frigid soil temperature regime. * Sent to offices using soils in the mesic soil temperature regime. # Sent to all offices. The above x3780s contained the following updated Official Series Descriptions, which can also be obtained at: http://www.statlab.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/osd/osdname.cgi frigid croswell...dawson...east lake...grettum...halfaday...leafriver.. morganlake...newson...rubicon...springlake mesic ######################################################################### ACTIVITY SCHEDULE (through February 15--subject to change) MLRA DATE ACTIVITY LOCATION MO 10 STAFF ---- --------- ---------------------------- ----------------- ----------- 88 Feb 07-11 Steering Committee Meeting Virginia Giencke 90 Feb 01-02 Steering Committee Meeting Hinckley Jahnke Giencke 93 Feb 07-11 Steering Committee Meeting Virginia Giencke 103 Jan 11-12 Steering Committee Meeting St. Peter Giencke 105 Jan 17-21 Steering Committee Meeting Rochester Jahnke Hempel 107 Jan 31-04 Final Field Review Woodbury Hempel 107 Feb 14-18 Steering Committee Meeting Sioux City Hempel 108 Jan 17-21 Final Field Review Rock Falls Hempel all Jan 04-06 NASIS Introductory Training St. Paul DesLauriers all Jan 11-13 NASIS Introductory Training St. Paul Handler all Jan 24-28 MO Leaders Meeting Phoenix McCloskey all Jan 25-27 NASIS Introductory Training St. Paul DesLauriers ######################################################################### CONTRIBUTIONS, IDEAS, SUGGESTIONS, AND QUESTIONS ARE WELCOME This newsletter is intended to be a forum to distribute information of a general nature that will benefit soil scientists in soil survey project offices. It is hoped that it will foster communications and sharing of knowledge among those soil scientists in MLRA Region 10. * * * * * Articles from other newsletters are often included to distribute ideas and comments from other areas of the country; these ideas and comments are not necessarily identical to those used in MLRA Region 10. * * * * * The format of this newsletter is intentionally simple so that it can be received, read, and printed by the project office having the least sophisticated computer and printer setup. * * * * * Thanks to those individuals who participated this month. It is your efforts that have made this newsletter a success. * * * * * Please submit your articles at least five days before the end of the month for inclusion in the following month's newsletter. Otherwise it will appear the following month. Occasionally, due to other workload demands, it may be an additional month before the article appears. Generally, articles are inserted in the order they are received. Articles in an electronic format can be submitted to: jfh@mn.nrcs.usda.gov. It is best if electronic articles are prepared in a "text only" format. Articles in a paper format can be sent or faxed to: John Handler MLRA Region 10 Office USDA - NRCS 375 Jackson Street - Suite 600 St. Paul, Minnesota 55101-1854 FAX: 1-651-602-7914 * * * * * Previous month's copies of this newsletter are available at: http://www.mn.nrcs.usda.gov/mo10/mo10.html #########################################################################