Soils

While soil may at first appear to simply be the stuff we walk on, it actually has various characteristics and varies depending on its location. This can contribute to the type of plants and animals that live in those areas. It is composed of silt, sand, and clay in various percentages, as seen by the diagram below:

You can estimate the type of  soil by following the intersecting lines as follows: sand is the upward left lines, clay is the horizontal, and silt is the downward left lines.

The Munsell Soil System helps specify the colors of the soil based on hue, value, and chroma.
 It was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th century and adopted by the USDA as the official color system for soil research in the 1930s.
Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three-dimensional color solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and was the first to systematically illustrate the colors in three-dimensional space.^[1] Munsell’s system, particularly the later renotations, is based on rigorous measurements of human subjects’ visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis. Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell’s system has outlasted its contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by models such as CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system








  The USDA, or the United States Department of Agriculture, has created 12 groups of soil types to differentiate between the world's soils. If you click on the image above, it will take you to a site that can give you more information about each type of soil.

Based on several factors, it appears that the primary soil type of Georgia is the Tifton soil series.. The Tifton soil series was one of the first soils to be established in Georgia. The Tifton series was established in Grady County, Georgia, in a 1908 soil survey conducted by Hugh Hammond Bennett.
A typical Tifton soil profile consists of an 11 inch topsoil of dark grayish brown loamy sand. The subsoil extends to about 65 inches, strong brown fine sandy loam to 22 inches; yellowish brown sandy clay loam to 40 inches; yellowish brown mottled, sandy clay loam to 60 inches, and strong brown, mottled sandy clay to 65 inches. Two distinctive features of the Tifton soil profile are the presence of more than 5 percent ironstone nodules in the upper part of the soil and more than 5 percent plinthite in the lower part of the soil.
source: http://www.mo15.nrcs.usda.gov/news/state_soils/ga_ss.html