Global Soil Hydraulic Properties dataset based on legacy site observations and robust parameterization

The representation of land surface processes in hydrological and climatic models critically depends on the soil water characteristics curve (SWCC) that defines the plant availability and water storage in the vadose zone. Despite the availability of SWCC datasets in the literature, significant efforts are required to harmonize reported data before SWCC parameters can be determined and implemented in modeling applications. In this work, a total of 15,259 SWCCs from 2,702 sites were assembled from published literature, harmonized, and quality-checked. The assembled SWCC data provide a global soil hydraulic properties (GSHP) database. Parameters of the van Genuchten (vG) SWCC model were estimated from the data using the R package ‘soilhypfit’. In many cases, information on the wet- or dry-end of the SWCC measurements were missing, and we used pedotransfer functions (PTFs) to estimate saturated and residual water contents. The new database quantifies the differences of SWCCs across climatic regions and can be used to create global maps of soil hydraulic properties. (abatract of of the scientific article)
Database: A total of 15,259 SWCCs from 2,702 sites were assembled from published literature and other sources, standardized, and quality-checked to obtain global database of soil hydraulic properties (GSHP). The GSHP database covers most regions across the globe, with the highest number of curves from North America followed by Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia/Oceania. In addition to SWCCs, other soil variables such as soil texture (12,233 measurements), bulk density (15,125 measurements), and soil organic carbon (2,255 measurements) are also listed in the database.

The R code used for this study is available here: https://github.com/ETHZ-repositories/GSHP-database