About NRCS West Central Glaciated Soil Survey Region

The MLRA Soil Survey Region 10 Office is located in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is one of 18 MLRA Regional Offices serving the fifty United States, and U.S. territories and possessions in the Caribbean Area and the Pacific Basin. The MLRA Soil Survey Region 10 Office serves the West Central Glaciated Region, providing assistance to soil survey project offices located in Iowa and parts of Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. A map showing the area within MLRA Soil Survey Region 10 is available. Another map showing the 18 MLRA Soil Survey Regions is also available.

Major Land Resource Areas (MLRAs) are geographically associated land resource units that share a common land use, elevation and topography, climate, water, soils, and vegetation. There are 208 of them in the U.S. and the Caribbean Area, ranging in size from 110 to 110,000 square miles (285 to 285,000 square kilometers). Most MLRAs are one contiguous area; a few consist of two or more areas separated by short distances. Sixteen of those 208 MLRAs are assigned to the MLRA Soil Survey Region 10 Office (map).

Soil Survey by Geographic Area is the approach to soil survey adopted by the Natural Resources Conservation Service in October 1995. The major change implemented with this approach is that the soil survey area is now a geographic area with naturally occurring boundaries (MLRAs), rather than areas with artificial boundaries (counties). All of our other time tested internal policies and procedures employed in producing a soil survey product remain essentially unchanged.

The basis for the procedures and guidelines offered by the MLRA Region 10 staff on this web site are contained in the document Soil Survey by Geographic Area - Major Land Resource Area.

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Soil Survey by Geographic Area - Major Land Resource Area (9.0 MB)

Last Modified: June 16, 2006