3D Soil Hydraulic Database of Europe at 1 km and 250 m resolution

A consistent spatial soil hydraulic database at 7 soil depths up to 2 m calculated for Europe based on SoilGrids250m and 1 km datasets and pedotransfer functions trained on the European Hydropedological Data Inventory. 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 have been predicted. The derived 3D soil hydraulic layers (EU-SoilHydroGrids ver1.0) can be used for environmental modelling purposes at catchment or continental scale in Europe. Currently, only EU-SoilHydroGrids provides information on the most frequently required soil hydraulic properties with full European coverage up to 2 m depth at 250 m resolution.
3D Soil Hydraulic Database of Europe at 1 km and 250 m resolution
Registration is requested: 
Yes
Author - Contributors: 
Brigitta Tóth, Melanie Weynants, László Pásztor, Tomislav Hengl
Publisher: 
Wiley Online Library
Year: 
2017
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).
 
For methods, results and further discussion, reference is made to the accompanying paper: "3D soil hydraulic database of Europe at 250 m resolution" (Brigitta Tóth, Melanie Weynants, László Pásztor, Tomislav Hengl)
 
On this site, more information on soil hydraulic properties can be found here.
 
Metadata for the datasets.:
 

Resolution:

250 m (link is external)

Data format:

GeoTIFF

Spatial coverage:

Europe

Coordinate Reference System:  

Projection: Azimuthal Equidistant
Latitude at projection centre : 53
Latitude at projection centre: 24
False Easting : 5837287.81977
False Northing: 2121415.69617
Units: meter
Datum: WGS84
Ellipsoid: WGS84

 

 

 

Resolution:

30 arcseconds (about 1 km at the Equator) (link is external)

Data format:

GeoTIFF  (112 files; 7 depths for 16 variables (see paper))

Spatial coverage:

Europe

Coordinate Reference System:  

Projection: Longitude Latitude
Units: decimal degrees
Datum: WGS84
Ellipsoid: WGS84

 

 

Reference of the dataset:

Tóth, B., Weynants, M., Pásztor, L., Hengl, T. 2017. 
3D Soil Hydraulic Database of Europe at 250 m resolution.(link is external)
Hydrol. Process., doi: 10.1002/hyp.11203.

 

 

Data license:

Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)(link is external)


 
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.

 

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