SoilKsatDB: global compilation of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements for geoscience applications

A total of 13,267 Ksat measurements from 1,910 sites were assembled from the published literature and other sources, standardized, and quality-checked in order to obtain a global database of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity (SoilKsatDB). The SoilKsatDB covers most global regions, with the highest data density from North America, followed by Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia. In addition to Ksat, other soil variables such as soil texture (11,591 measurements), bulk density (11,269 measurements), soil organic carbon (9,787 measurements), field capacity (7,389) and wilting point (7,418) are also included in the data set.

To cite this dataset please use:

• Gupta, S., Hengl, T., Lehmann, P., Bonetti, S., and Or, D.: SoilKsatDB: global soil saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements for geoscience applications, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2020-149, in review, 2021.

Examples of using the SoilKsatDB to generate global maps of Ksat can be found in:

• Gupta, S., Hengl, T., Lehmann, P., Bonetti, S., Papritz, A. and Or, D. (2021): Global prediction of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity using random forest in a Covariate-based Geo Transfer Functions (CoGTF) framework. accepted for publication in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES). 

Importing and binding steps are described in detail here. To report an issue or bug please use this link. Ksat data tutorial explaining how to access and use data is available here.

Description of the files: the datasets in this repository include:

• soil_ksat.pnts_horizons.***: provides a global compilation of Ksat values and the information described in Table 2 in Gupta et al, (2020). This data is provided in three different data formats.
• soil_hydro.pnts_horizons.***: provides water retention curve values and other soil hydraulic properties. This data is provided in three different data formats.
• sol_ksat.pnts_cl_pedo.csv: provides information of estimated soil pedologic unit and climatic region for each Ksat sample.
• sol_ksat.pnts_metadata.csv: provides meta-information with location accuracy and additional metadata per source dataset and/or site location.

SoilKsatDB is available in CSV, ARFF and RDS formats. ARFF was prepared using the farff package for R. ARFF' (Attribute-Relation File Format) files are like 'CSV' files, with a little bit of added meta information in a header and standardized NA values. Column codes are based on the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) Soil Characterization Database naming convention (see "README." for explanation of codes).

The SoilKsatDB is a compilation of numerous existing datasets from which the most significant: SWIG data set (Rahmati et al., 2018), UNSODA (Leij et al., 1996), and HYBRAS (Ottoni et al., 2018).