Moving beyond the Udorthent—A Proposed Protocol for Assessing Urban Soils to Service Data Needs for Contemporary Urban Ecosystem Management

County‐level, Order 2 soil surveys have been used for decades to illustrate the spatial distribution of soils and communicate the utility and limitations of soil series. For the vast majority of these soil surveys, however, there is a distinct lack of resolution of soil series and associated data for urban or highly developed areas of the United States. Yet, with unprecedented vacancy and demolitions in major U.S. cities, the availability of large tracts of open and relatively inexpensive urban land suggests that there are many prospects for using these soils for something other than redevelopment. Therefore, current public interests center on how urban soils may be used to provide a myriad of ecosystem services. Due to the different emphasis, data needs are different than for past soil surveys and we therefore suggest an approach and protocol that was employed in Cleveland, OH in 2010. This work is centered on the possibility of using vacant land mass to infiltrate and otherwise absorb excess stormwater runoff quantity as a sustainable and putatively cost‐effective way of managing combined sewer overflows (CSO). We examined a sample set of 56 vacant lots and 14 city parks or cemeteries located in the drainage areas of relatively small‐volume, high frequency CSOs. This paper details the survey approach rationale, methods, and level of effort required and presents a case study. Overall, this work is submitted as a proposal to the soil survey community for a soil survey protocol aimed at servicing emergent environmental management data needs in urban core areas of the United States.