Soil disturbance, RUSLE and STIR

Hello
I keep trying to get used to FarmOS.
Today I tried the soil disturbance quick form and found that NCRS data was entered.
I work on keyline design. It’s very interesting.
I read https://www.drupal.org/project/farm/issues/2407529
but the reference to the NCRS website
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/mn/technical/?cid=nrcs142p2_023678
is no longer available.
Do you have any valid references now? (In Italy there is something I have to go to study again)
Is it possible in the future to be able to insert local data from scientific bibliography?

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Good questions @bonushenricus - here is some background:

The soil disturbance quick form was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, as a way to collect soil disturbance data for their Soil Health Benchmark Study.

That quick form is provided by the farm_soil module: https://github.com/farmOS/farmOS/blob/7.x-1.x/modules/farm/farm_soil/farm_soil.farm_quick.disturbance.inc

One of the things PASA wanted to do was capture the STIR value of those operations (Soil Tillage Intensity Rating). They provided me with a CSV file of STIR values for 569 operations. My understanding is that these were calculated using the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE).

Here is an updated link to the RUSLE information on the USDA website: https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/revised-universal-soil-loss-equation-version-2-rusle2

The CSV of STIR values is included in the farmOS repository here: https://github.com/farmOS/farmOS/blob/7.x-1.x/modules/farm/farm_soil/farm_soil_nrcs/data/STIR-operations.csv

We also include a SOURCES.md file in the same directory which states where the data came from: https://github.com/farmOS/farmOS/blob/7.x-1.x/modules/farm/farm_soil/farm_soil_nrcs/data/SOURCES.md

I do not have a direct link to the “2008 RUSLE2 manual” that PASA got the data from, unfortunately. If anyone has a link, I’d love to update the SOURCES.md file to include that information.

Notably, the STIR-operations.csv is provided by the farm_soil_nrcs module - NOT the farm_soil module. The NRCS module alters the soil disturbance quick form to add the STIR value field. So that field is only added to the form if the NRCS module is enabled. In that way, it is possible for other modules to do something similar - if there are other data sets we want to use instead of the STIR values.

Here is where the form alter code is: https://github.com/farmOS/farmOS/blob/7.x-1.x/modules/farm/farm_soil/farm_soil_nrcs/farm_soil_nrcs.module#L39

Generally speaking, we don’t have a strict process around incorporating datasets/vocabularies into farmOS. This was one of the first. My thought is that a similar approach can be used moving forward, whereby new modules can be responsible for providing those.

Hope that helps!