3D soil hydraulic database of Europe at 250 m resolution

Brigitta Tóth,László Pásztor,Tomislav Hengl,Melanie Weynants

doi:10.1002/hyp.11203

Abstract

AbstractSoil hydraulic properties are required in various modelling schemes. We propose 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.

Highlights

For the comparison of EU‐SoilHydroGrids and ESDAC SHP, mean THS, Field capacity (FC), Wilting point (WP), and KS values have been calculated in EU‐ SoilHydroGrids 1 km based on the first four layers of the dataset
We evaluated the performance of EU‐SoilHydroGrids ver1.0 and ESDAC SHP to reproduce the measured soil hydraulic properties of European Hydropedological Dataset (EU‐HYDI) on more than 1500 samples (Table 4.)
Performance of soil hydraulic predictions improved up to 21% based on root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) values compared to ESDAC SHP

Summary

Introduction

We compared the performance of the EU‐SoilHydroGrids to that of the European Soil Data Centre's soil hydraulic properties (ESDAC SHP; Tóth & Weynants, 2016) at 1 km scale. For the comparison of EU‐SoilHydroGrids and ESDAC SHP, mean THS, FC, WP, and KS values have been calculated in EU‐ SoilHydroGrids 1 km based on the first four layers of the dataset.

Results

Conclusion