Soil, Landcover and DEM database for Ireland to be used with SWAT model

Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) are being extensively used by hydrologists and environmentalists to simulate river discharge and water quality at watershed/basin scale across the world. This database contains generates soil and landcover database that can be used for the SWAT modelling for river basins located in Ireland. The soil database has been created based on soil testing experiments conducted during the STRIVE programme by Teagasc and Environmental Protection Agency Ireland. The landcover database has been created by relating the landcover data obtained from the CORINE database with the default SWAT landcover database. A newly created SWAT geodatabase has been generated that can be used as a replacement from the default SWAT database for simulating runoff and water quality at river basins in Ireland. In the data folder, the following data and databases are available: i) SWAT2012.mdb, ii) DEM_IRL_ITM.tif, iii) LULC2018_IRL_ITM.tif, iv) lulc_classes.txt, v) SOIL_IRL_ITM.tif, vi) soillookup.txt, and vii) WFD_Rivers_ITM.shp and WFD_SubBasins_ITM.shp inside WFD_River_Subbasin.rar. The newly developed soil database is integrated into SWAT geodatabase SWAT2012.mdb. Once the SWAT model is set up, the default SWAT2012.mdb needs to be replaced by the newly created SWAT2012.mdb before processing the model development. The filled DEM for Ireland (DEM_IRL_ITM.tif) can be used to generate the stream network, delineate watershed boundary and create the basin slope. The river network and the sub-watersheds/subbasins for Ireland were developed by the Environmental Protection Agency Ireland under Water Framework Directive (WFD) as open data. The river and subbasin network were provided as shapefile (WFD_Rivers_ITM.shp and WFD_SubBasins_ITM.shp). The landcover map for Ireland (LULC2018_IRL_ITM.tif) has the available 35 landcover classes, while the soil map (SOIL_IRL_ITM.tif) has 69 soil classes. It should be noted that SWAT model requires the DEM, landcover and soil maps in a projected co-ordinate system. All the maps and shapefiles in the database has been projected into Irish Transverse Mercator co-ordinate system with an EPSG code of 2157. The landcover map should be reclassified using the landcover classes shown in landcover lookup table (lulc_classes.txt) in order to relate the CORINE landcover classifications with landcover classes recognized by the SWAT model. Similarly, the soil map needs to be reclassified using the soil lookup table (soillookup.txt).