soils

Overview

As part of the Washington Soil Health Initiative, the Washington State Department of Agriculture and Washington State University developed {soils} for soil health data visualization and reporting.

{soils} gives you a RStudio project template with everything you need to generate custom HTML and Microsoft Word reports for each participant in your soil health survey.

Quick Video Demos

Create a {soils} Project

create_soils.webm

Render a MS Word Report

create_docx.webm

Render a HTML Report

create_html.webm

Programmatically Render Multiple Reports at Once

render_reports.webm

Requirements

The report template uses Quarto, which is the next-generation version of R Markdown.

We assume you’re working in RStudio Desktop with a version of at least v2022.07 for editing and previewing Quarto documents. Though it is strongly recommended that you use the latest release of RStudio.

To render .docx files, you must have Microsoft Word installed.

Installation

Install the development version of {soils} from our r-universe with:

install.packages(
  "soils",
  repos = c(
    "https://wa-department-of-agriculture.r-universe.dev",
    "https://cloud.r-project.org",
    "https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/cran/"
  )
)

# Load all the example data sets and functions
library(soils)

Creating a New {soils} Project

Use the RStudio IDE to create a new {soils} RStudio project.

Open RStudio > File > New Project > New Directory > Quarto Soil Health Report

Enter your desired directory name, browse to where you want the project to live, and check whether you want the project to open in a new RStudio session.

A new RStudio project will open with the template Quarto report and a script to render all reports. Other documents and resources will appear in the files pane.

Read the article Get Started to learn what goodies are bundled within {soils}.

Example Soil Health Reports

{soils} helps you generate custom static .docx reports and interactive .html reports for every producer or land owner in your soil health survey project.

See demo reports rendered directly from this template project:

MS Word Example

HTML Example

Read the article Build a Report for a detailed walk-through of the project and workflow for adapting this template for your own project.

Acknowledgement and Citation

The below acknowledgement is automatically embedded in each report:

The Soil Health Report Template used to generate this report was developed by Washington State Department of Agriculture and Washington State University (WSU) as part of the Washington Soil Health Initiative. Text and figures were adapted from WSU Extension publication #FS378E Soil Health in Washington Vineyards.

To cite {soils} in publications, please use:

Ryan JN, McIlquham M, Sarpong KA, Michel L, Potter T, Griffin LaHue D, Gelardi DL. 2023. Visualize and Report Soil Health Survey Data with {soils}. Washington Soil Health Initiative. https://github.com/WA-Department-of-Agriculture/soils

Credits

{soils} adapts from existing R project templating resources and packages:

• RStudio Project Templates
• {ratlas}
• {quartotemplate}
• {golem}