Soil cartography of Costa Rica available for download: the soil order and suborder layers, and the register of soil pits surveyed in the field.
Cartographic layers of soil orders and suborders of Costa Rica
The files are distributed as ZIP archives. The layers come as shapefiles, ready to open in a geographic information system, and include the style sheet used to draw them in QGIS.
- Soil ordersCartographic layer of soil orders, 2020 edition. Shapefile with its QGIS style sheet. ZIP · 3,5 MB
- Soil subordersCartographic layer of soil suborders, 2020 edition. Shapefile with its QGIS style sheet. ZIP · 3,7 MB
- Soil pitsSpreadsheet with the register of soil pits and the data recorded at each one. XLSX · 4,6 MB
What the soil pit register contains
The spreadsheet gathers the field work of the Natural Resources Laboratory: each row is one horizon of a soil pit, and each pit contributes as many rows as horizons were described in it. There are pits in all seven provinces of the country.
What is recorded for each horizon
- Coordinates and administrative location
- Horizon number, symbol and depth in centimetres
- USDA taxonomic classification and category
- Cation exchange capacity, pH in water, in NaF and in KCl
- Electrical conductivity and particle size, including the coarse fraction
- Penetration resistance, hydraulic conductivity and COLE
- Matrix colour and structure
- Physiographic province, parent material, soil climate and life zone
- Relief, slope, aspect and elevation
- Vegetation, fertility, drainage and depth to the water table
Soil orders represented
Counted by described horizon, from most to least: Inceptisols (3,039), Ultisols (2,400), Andisols (677), Entisols (520), Vertisols (236), Alfisols (217), Mollisols (210), Oxisols (78), Spodosols (39) and Histosols (17).
