Data Preprocessing of Soil Attributes for Ecohydrological Applications Using SWAT Model at Xin'anjiang Upstream Watershed, China

Abstract

Ecohydrological (EH) models have been widely applied worldwide to investigate hydrological and environmental issues. One obstacle for EH model application in China is the input data preparation, especially the soil data. This study aims to develop two sets of methods respectively for soil data preprocessing with two different soil database sources (Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) and domestic Chinese Soil Databases (CSD)) for a typical EH model of SWAT in China. With the two sets of developed methods, we have resulted two sets of SWAT soil datasets for the study region of a real Chinese landscape respectively. Both sets of methods with different database sources can be generalized for other landscapes in China. We further compare the two sets of methods to give suggestions for the selection of the two database sources when applying SWAT in Chinese landscapes. With HWSD, soil data preprocessing requires relatively less work, while there are relatively more soil types being resulted. With CSD, although soil data preprocessing require relatively more work and there are relatively less soil types, the attribute information for each soil type is more detailed.