  Stars form in cold dense cores showing subsonic velocity dispersions. The
parental molecular clouds display higher temperatures and supersonic velocity
dispersions. The transition from core to cloud has been observed in velocity
dispersion, but temperature and abundance variations are unknown. We aim to
study the transition from cores to ambient cloud in temperature and velocity
dispersion using a single tracer.
  We use NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) maps in L1688 from the Green Bank Ammonia Survey,
smoothed to 1', and determine the physical properties from fits. We identify
the coherent cores and study the changes in temperature and velocity dispersion
from cores to the surrounding cloud. We obtain a kinetic temperature map
tracing the extended cloud, improving from previous maps tracing mostly the
cores. The cloud is 4-6 K warmer than the cores, and shows a larger velocity
dispersion (diff. = 0.15-0.25 km/s). Comparing to Herschel-based measurements,
we find that cores show kinetic temperature $\approx$1.8 K lower than the dust
temperature; while the gas temperature is higher than the dust temperature in
the cloud. We find an average p-NH3 fractional abundance (with respect to H2)
of $(4.2\pm0.2) \times 10^{-9}$ towards the coherent cores, and $(1.4\pm0.1)
\times 10^{-9}$ outside the core boundaries. Using stacked spectra, we detect
two components, one narrow and one broad, towards cores and their
neighbourhoods. We find the turbulence in the narrow component to be correlated
to the size of the structure (Pearson-r=0.54). With these unresolved regional
measurements, we obtain a turbulence-size relation of ${\sigma}_{v,NT}\propto
r^{0.5}$, similar to previous findings using multiple tracers.
  We discover that the subsonic component extends up to 0.15 pc beyond the
typical coherent boundaries, unveiling larger extents of the coherent cores and
showing gradual transition to coherence over ~0.2 pc.
