USDA 1974 soil, woodland, tree-type, and wildlife evidence index

What this index adds

The 1974 USDA Soil Survey of Charlevoix County is already in the corpus as a soil-map and narrative source. Its most useful ecology bridge is easy to miss: the survey groups soils by woodland suitability, names preferred tree species, describes hazards such as wetness, erosion, drought, and windthrow, and then rates broad soil suitability for wildlife-habitat elements. This index makes those sections searchable without turning a county recommendation into a current island inventory.

The index contains 18 source-section records:

The JSON preserves the complete OCR section text, one-based OCR line ranges, PDF pages, and transparent parser-derived terms. The PDF remains the authority when a scan and OCR disagree.

The survey’s three woodland types

The survey’s aspen and white-birch section describes quaking and largetooth aspen, white birch, even-aged stands following extensive logging and severe fires, and eventual conversion toward pine or mixed pine-hardwood stands. Its pines section names jack pine, red pine, and white pine, distinguishing natural pine on well-drained sand and loamy sand from plantations and white pine mixed with hardwoods on better-drained sandy-loam to clay-loam soils. The conifer swamp section names black spruce, white cedar, tamarack, balsam fir, hemlock, and white pine, with aspen, birch, elm, willow, red maple, and shrubs in mixed stands.

These are county woodland types, not descriptions of every Beaver Island stand. They provide historical vocabulary for reading the island-specific MNFI and DNR records: a source can discuss cedar, spruce, pine, aspen, or hardwoods without implying that the 1974 county type is a current natural-community classification.

Soil conditions and woodland priorities

The 13 suitability groups are a management taxonomy based on drainage, permeability, water capacity, fertility, slope, species priority, seedling mortality, plant competition, equipment limits, erosion, and windthrow. The following compact map is derived from the preserved group sections:

The table is useful as a controlled comparison, not as a prescription. For example, the survey’s sandy dune group and the MNFI dune occurrences overlap in vocabulary—sand, drought, pine, erosion, and wind—but they are different records at different scales and dates.

The explicitly island-named association

The survey’s Roscommon–Charlevoix–Mackinac association is the strongest direct island connection in this section. It says the nearly level to gently undulating former glacial-lake-plain soils occur on Beaver, Garden, High, and Hog Islands. Roscommon is described as poorly drained sand in depressions; Charlevoix and Mackinac as somewhat poorly drained loamy soils with mottled profiles; and the association as mostly wooded and well suited to hunting areas. The survey says Charlevoix and Mackinac are more productive than Roscommon and moderately suited to hardwoods, while Roscommon is poorly suited to farming and hardwoods.

This is an explicit county-survey statement, not an occurrence boundary. It does not assign each island the same acreage, soil series, forest type, or wildlife population. The island-level SSURGO crosswalk and MNFI occurrence records remain separate layers for spatial and field evidence.

Wildlife-habitat table

Table 4 rates soil map units for 11 broad habitat and wildlife elements. The first four are grain and seed crops, grasses and legumes, wild herbaceous upland plants, and hardwood woody plants; the continuation page adds coniferous woody plants, wetland food and cover plants, shallow-water developments, excavated ponds, open-land wildlife, woodland wildlife, and wetland wildlife. Its ratings—“well suited,” “suited,” “poorly suited,” or “not suited”—are soil-management interpretations. They do not report birds, mammals, nesting, abundance, breeding success, or current occupancy.

All 76 rated rows have been checked directly against the paired scan pages and entered at row level for all 11 columns. The first four columns appear on the preceding page and the seven continuation columns on the following page, in the same table row order. The two tables below show 15 featured rows; the complete 76-row set is in the JSON index, including composite rows whose source cells contain conditional map-unit text rather than one flattened rating:

The paired-page continuation values are:

The JSON records the paired PDF pages, row-order index, and all 11 verified values for each rated row. The separate unrated_wildlife_rows field preserves Made land’s instruction that individual areas require onsite investigation. Seven rows have scan-verified ratings but no reliable OCR label match because the OCR misread or dropped their map symbols; they are explicitly marked scan-only-ocr-label-variant rather than treated as missing evidence.

The table nevertheless adds a useful historical bridge. Soil wetness, drainage, organic layers, stoniness, and woodland potential were treated as relevant to habitat planning in the same source that organized tree productivity and regeneration. This can be compared with the MNFI wildlife signals, Piping Plover foredune/cobble evidence, woodcock habitat study, mapped-dune reports, and GBIF observations—without collapsing any of those sources into the USDA ratings.

Scale and date discipline

The survey’s main fieldwork was 1959–1962, its soil names and descriptions were approved in 1966, and the publication is dated 1974. The woodland and wildlife sections describe Charlevoix County and use statewide suitability groups. Only the Roscommon–Charlevoix–Mackinac association is explicitly island-named in the extracted section.

Accordingly:

• The index does not infer that every island contains every soil series in a woodland group.
• It does not convert group recommendations into current forest composition, stand age, species abundance, or habitat occupancy.
• It does not replace SSURGO, MNFI field pages, the DNR stand layer, current NLCD/canopy products, or field verification.
• It preserves Fox Islands in the broader soil and ecology graph only through sources that actually cover them; this 1974 section does not silently extend the explicit Beaver/Garden/High/Hog statement to North or South Fox.

Read the document

200 pages, rendered from the held scan.

Jump to a page — 200 in all

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233353739414345474951535557596163656769717375777981838587899193959799101103105107109111113115117119121123125127129131133135137139141143145147149151153155157159161163165167169171173175177179181183185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200

124 of 200 pages linked here — every page to 32, then every 2th, then the last 16. With JavaScript, every page.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes