The archive has a new practitioner entry: Soil Data Sources, on where trustworthy soil data actually comes from.
It maps the three families every field-scale model draws on — public surveys (USDA’s SSURGO and Web Soil Survey, ISRIC’s SoilGrids), in-field sensors (mesonet networks and on-farm probes, with NASA POWER supplying the weather forcing), and laboratory samples — and, just as importantly, what each one cannot tell you: a survey map unit is not your field, a probe is a point rather than a field, and a lab result expires the moment conditions change. The entry closes with a working order for combining them: chart first, sensors second, lab samples as the anchor. Every source it cites was verified live before publication.
This entry was the Precision Agriculture Specialist path’s first gap: it had been listed as a planned stub since the path launched, an honest hole in the sequence. With its publication, the path’s derived coverage — computed from entry status at build time, never hand-written — now reads 9 of 10 steps available today. One planned entry remains, Introduction to Remote Sensing, and it’s next on the writing backlog.
If you’re walking the path, step 5 just opened.