Algorithms for quantitative pedology: A toolkit for soil scientists

Soils are routinely sampled and characterized according to genetic horizons, resulting in data that are associated with principle dimensions: location (x, y), depth (z), and property space ( p ). The high dimensionality and grouped nature of this type of data can complicate standard analysis, summarization, and visualization. The “aqp” (algorithms for quantitative pedology) package was designed to support data-driven approaches to common soils-related tasks such as visualization, aggregation, and classification of soil profile collections. In addition, we sought to advance the study of numerical soil classification by building on previously published methods within an extensible and open source framework. Functions in the aqp package have been successfully applied to studies involving several thousand soil profiles. The stable version of the aqp package is hosted by CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/aqp), and the development version is hosted by R-Forge (http://aqp.r-forge.r-project.org).