Soil Hydraulic Properties of Europe at 500 m Resolution for Topsoil Using EUPTFv2 and LUCAS Soil Data

Abstract

Soil hydraulic properties govern the movement and storage of water in soils and are essential inputs for hydrological and land surface models, influencing water‐holding capacity, matter and energy transport, erosion susceptibility and plant water availability. However, direct measurement of these properties is labour‐intensive and thus often limited in spatial coverage. Therefore, pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are widely used to estimate soil hydraulic properties from readily available soil characteristics. We present a spatial dataset of soil hydraulic properties for Europe at 0–20 cm depth, developed using harmonised soil property maps derived from the LUCAS dataset and the improved PTFs (EUPTFv2) proposed by Szabó et al., which are developed on the European Hydropedological Data Inventory. The derived dataset includes water content at saturation, field capacity (at −10 and −33 kPa), wilting point (−1500 kPa), saturated hydraulic conductivity and their associated uncertainty maps. In addition, we derived available water capacity and air capacity (air‐filled porosity) from the predicted properties. The input datasets (LUCAS‐based soil maps) used in this study are derived from harmonised data in terms of measurement methods and spatial consistency. This is expected to improve the reliability of the resulting maps compared with existing products. The generated dataset is freely available and can therefore support a wide range of environmental and modelling applications.