Layers with overlapping or duplicate depths within the same profile create issues when aggregating data. Based on earlier discussions of what constitutes a profile, I suggest that going forward, QA/QC should flag these profiles.
I don't think there are many of these profiles in the current version of ISRaD, but I recently ran across one (Gentsch_2018), so there may be more. In this case the authors had sampled multiple layers from a large pit face in order to better characterize the heterogeneity of the soil profile. I reassigned the original profile IDs to the plot level, and assigned the overlapping or duplicate depths to separate profiles. I added a note at the profile level to clarify this change.
Any thoughts about disallowing these sorts of overlapping profiles going forward? Any objections to implementing an official check in QA/QC?
Layers with overlapping or duplicate depths within the same profile create issues when aggregating data. Based on earlier discussions of what constitutes a profile, I suggest that going forward, QA/QC should flag these profiles.
I don't think there are many of these profiles in the current version of ISRaD, but I recently ran across one (Gentsch_2018), so there may be more. In this case the authors had sampled multiple layers from a large pit face in order to better characterize the heterogeneity of the soil profile. I reassigned the original profile IDs to the plot level, and assigned the overlapping or duplicate depths to separate profiles. I added a note at the profile level to clarify this change.
Any thoughts about disallowing these sorts of overlapping profiles going forward? Any objections to implementing an official check in QA/QC?