The multilayered European Soil Hydraulic Database (EU-SoilHydroGrids ver1.0) was derived with European pedotransfer functions (
EU-PTFs; Tóth et al., 2015) based on the soil information of SoilGrids250m and aggregated 1 km (Hengl et al., 2017) datasets.
It covers the parameters:
- saturated water content,
- water content at field capacity and wilting point,
- saturated hydraulic conductivity and Mualem-van Genuchten parameters for the description of the moisture retention, and
- unsaturated hydraulic conductivity curves
The EU-PTFs (
Tóth et al., 2015) were trained on the European Hydropedological Dataset (EU-HYDI;
Weynants et al., 2013). EU-HYDI is a collection of data from 29 institutions in 18 European countries and contains data on taxonomical, chemical, and physical soil properties of more than 18,000 soil samples. Pedotransfer functions were calibrated using soil information of 134 to 6,074 soil samples and validated on 57 to 2,357 samples, depending on the type of soil hydraulic property (Tóth et al., 2015).
SoilGrids provides the most detailed information on soil properties with full continental coverage in Europe. It incorporates soil taxonomical, physical, and chemical data of seven soil depths at 250 m resolution (Hengl et al., 2017). The following soil properties to calculate the soil hydraulic properties were used: clay, silt, and sand content (mass %); organic carbon content (g kg−1); bulk density (kg m−3); pH in water and depth to bedrock (cm) at 0, 5, 15, 30, 60, 100, and 200 cm depth. The first four depths, which are less than or equal to 30 cm depth, are considered as topsoil and the remaining handled as subsoil in accordance with the EU-PTFs used for calculations (Tóth et al., 2015).
In case bedrock appears within 200 cm, hydraulic properties were calculated up to the first layer underlying the top of the bedrock providing the possibility to interpolate the soil hydraulic properties through different soil depths. For modelling purposes, the predicted depth to bedrock is available from
www.soilgrids.org; data are described in detail in Shangguan, Hengl, Mendes de Jesus, Yuan, and Dai (2017).
On this site, more information on soil hydraulic properties can be found
here.
Metadata for the datasets.:
Further details on the database is available from here, copyright information is described here.
Note: surface water and rock outcrop or bedrock is indicated as no data.
To navigate the very many and large 250m folders and in order to quickly identify and select only those folders for their area of interest, an ESDAC user (Alexander Kmoch, Research Fellow Geoinformatics, Department of Geography, University of Tartu) created a simple polygon layer based on the extents for each folder. This user offers these shapefiles/geopackage files here: GitHub or Zenodo.