soilKey: Automated Soil Profile Classification per 'WRB' 2022, 'SiBCS' 5 and 'USDA' Soil Taxonomy 13

Implements deterministic classification keys for the World Reference Base for Soil Resources ('WRB') 2022, 4th edition (IUSS Working Group WRB, 2022, ISBN:979-8-9862451-1-9), the Brazilian System of Soil Classification ('SiBCS') 5th edition (Santos et al., 2018, ISBN:978-85-7035-800-4) and the United States Department of Agriculture ('USDA') Soil Taxonomy 13th edition (Soil Survey Staff, 2022, <https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/resources/guides-and-instructions/keys-to-soil-taxonomy>). Provides a unified profile representation with explicit per-attribute provenance, multimodal extraction from field reports and photos via vision-language models (VLM), spatial priors from 'SoilGrids' (Poggio et al., 2021, <doi:10.5194/soil-7-217-2021>) and national soil maps, and gap-filling of soil attributes from visible-near-infrared (Vis-NIR) or mid-infrared (MIR) spectra via the Open Soil Spectral Library ('OSSL'; Safanelli et al., 2025, <doi:10.7717/peerj.18908>). The taxonomic key itself is never delegated to a large language model (LLM); LLMs are restricted to schema-validated extraction. Each classification result reports a key trace, a provenance-aware evidence grade, and ambiguities that further measurement would resolve.

Version: 0.9.97
Depends: R (≥ 4.1)
Imports: R6, data.table, yaml, cli, rlang, withr
Suggests: aqp, SoilTaxonomy, mpspline2, terra, foreign, sf, chromote, munsellinterpol, pls, prospectr, resemble, ellmer, httr, jsonlite, jsonvalidate, pdftools, magick, shiny, DT, DBI, RSQLite, testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-05-19
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.soilKey (may not be active yet)
Author: Hugo Rodrigues ORCID iD [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Hugo Rodrigues <rodrigues.machado.hugo at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/HugoMachadoRodrigues/soilKey/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/HugoMachadoRodrigues/soilKey, https://hugomachadorodrigues.github.io/soilKey/
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: soilKey citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: soilKey results

Documentation:

Reference manual: soilKey.html , soilKey.pdf
Vignettes: Getting started with soilKey (source, R code)
Começando com soilKey (PT-BR) (source, R code)
End-to-end WRB 2022 classification with Ch 6 names (source, R code)
Cross-system classification: WRB 2022, SiBCS 5, USDA Soil Taxonomy (source, R code)
Vision-language extraction of pedon data (Module 2) (source, R code)
Spatial prior + OSSL spectra pipeline (Modules 3 & 4) (source, R code)
Benchmarking soilKey against WoSIS (source, R code)
End-to-end pipeline: Gemma 4 + spatial + spectral + key + GIS export (source, R code)
KSSL + NASIS: multi-level USDA Soil Taxonomy benchmark (source, R code)
Um perfil real do A ao Z (estilo Embrapa, em portugues) (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: soilKey_0.9.97.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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