The purpose of these tools are to give users the ability to get Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO) properties and interpretations in an efficient manner. They are very similiar to the United States Department of Agriculture - Natural Resource Conservation Service's Soil Data Viewer (SDV) application, although there are distinct differences. The most important difference is the data collected with the SSURGO On-Demand (SOD) tools are collected in real-time via web requests to Soil Data Access (https://sdmdataaccess.nrcs.usda.gov/). This means that the information collected is the most up-to-date possible. SOD tools do not require users to have the data found in a traditional SSURGO download from the NRCS's official repository, Web Soil Survey (https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm). The main intent of both SOD and SDV are to hide the complex relationships of the SSURGO tables and allow the users to focus on asking the question they need to get the information they want. This is accomplished in the user interface of the tools and the subsequent SQL is built and executed for the user. Currently, the tools packaged here are designed to run within the ESRI ArcGIS Pro software and developed under version 2.8.3.

NOTE: The queries in these tools only consider the major components of soil map units.

There are currently 2 tools in this package, 1 for SSURGO properties and the other for SSURGO interpretations. Both tools require the user to provide a feature layer based upon a WGS84, NAD83, or NAD83(2011) geographic coordinate system. This feature layer determines the area of interest for which both SSURGO geometry and either property or interpretation are collected. The feature layer must have a selection. Even if there is only 1 feature in the layer, it must be selected. The output workspace is required to be a file geodatabase (gdb). The geometry collected is in WGS84 (4326). Each property or interpretations requested will output an individual table. Users have the option of updating the spatial attribute table with each property or interpretation requested.

It is very important to consider that Soil Data Access is limited in the number characters it can return. Due to this, there is an unknown constraint on how large an AOI can be requested because the characters (coordinates/vertices) can reach this threshold fairly quickly. This is locally dependent on polygon (mapping) density and vertex density. When this threshold is exceeded Soil Data Access returns nothing which will cause SSURGO On-Demand tools to exit.