GSHP: Global Soil Hydraulic Properties Database

15,259 soil water characteristic curves from 2,702 global sites form this standardized collection. The database also includes 12,233 soil texture measurements, 15,125 bulk density measurements, and 2,255 soil organic carbon measurements. It supports the generation of van Genuchten parameter maps for hydrological and agricultural modeling.

Use Cases

• Calibrating hydrological models based on soil water retention curves and texture data.
• Mapping soil hydraulic parameters like van Genuchten coefficients for regional studies.
• Analyzing global patterns of soil properties such as bulk density and organic carbon.
• Validating pedotransfer functions using a large, quality-checked observational dataset.

Strengths

• Large scale with 15,259 standardized and quality-checked soil water characteristic curves.
• Includes auxiliary soil measurements: 12,233 texture, 15,125 bulk density, and 2,255 organic carbon records.
• Global spatial coverage across six continents, with data from North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia/Oceania.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low; specific column names, row counts, and last update dates are not provided across sources.
• A known data issue exists for one subset where saturated hydraulic conductivity values require unit conversion.
• The number of measurements varies significantly between properties, with soil organic carbon having far fewer records.

Provenance

Source

ETH Zurich (Grant ETH-18 18-1), Surya Gupta et al.

Collection Method

Assembled from published literature and other sources, then standardized and quality-checked.

Geography

Global, with sites across most world regions.