Brigitta Szabó

Institute for Soil Sciences, HUN-REN Centre for Agricultural Research

To effectively guide agricultural management planning strategies and policy, it is important to simulate water quantity and quality patterns and to quantify the impact of land use and climate change on soil functions, soil health, and hydrological and other underlying processes. Environmental models that depict alterations in surface and groundwate...

Novel soil datasets and the application of pedotransfer functions provide soil hydraulic input data for modelling hydrological processes at different scales. We aimed to evaluate the reliability of soil hydraulic parameters derived by indirect methods in simulation of soil moisture time series and water budgets at profile level of three sites (Fore...

Hydro-pedotransfer functions (PTFs) relate easy-to-measure and readily available soil information to soil hydraulic properties (SHPs) for applications in a wide range of process-based and empirical models, thereby enabling the assessment of soil hydraulic effects on hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes. At least more than 4 decade...

Input data collection, quality assurance and preparation are central but time_consuming steps in environmental modeling. Errors due to manual processing of model input data can result in an incorrect representation of an environmental system and may consequently lead to implausible model simulations. Correct input data preparation and thorough qual...

Spatially explicit, quantitative information on soil hydraulic properties is required in various modelling schemes. At European scale, EU-SoilHydroGrids proved its applicability in a number of studies, in ecological predictions, geological and hydrological hazard assessment, agri-environmental models, among others. Inspired by its continental antec...

To effectively guide agricultural management planning strategies and policy, it is important to simulate water 15 quantity and quality patterns and quantify the impact of land use and climate change on underlying processes. Environmental models that depict alterations in surface and groundwater quality and quantity at a catchment scale require subs...

Accurate information on surface soil moisture (SSM) content at a global scale under different climatic conditions is important for hydrological and climatological applications. Machine-learning-based systematic integration of in situ hydrological measurements, complex environmental and climate data, and satellite observation facilitate the generati...

Hydro-pedotransfer functions (PTFs) relate easy-to-measure and readily available soil information to soil hydraulic properties for applications in a wide range of process-based and empirical models, thereby enabling the assessment of soil hydraulic effects on hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes. At least more than four decades of...

Accurate information on surface soil moisture (SSM) content at a global scale under different climatic conditions is important for hydrological and climatological applications. Machine learning (ML) based systematic integration of in-situ hydrological measurements, complex environmental and climate data and satellite observation facilitate to gener...

A methodology is presented for the quantitative assessment of soil biomass productivity at 100 m spatial resolution on a national scale. The traditional land evaluation approach-where crop yield is the dependent variable-was followed using measured yield and net primary productivity data derived from satellite images, together with digital soil and...

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) are increasingly employed to capture detailed features of an environment more efficiently and effectively than other remote sensing equipment. In this chapter, the importance of mapping soil physical, chemical, and other key properties will be discussed jointly with the presentation of both traditional and recent prox...

The OPTAIN project involves both, catchment-, and field-scale modelling of the transport of water and nutrients. The catchment-scale modelling is performed at fourteen case study catchments across Europe using the SWAT+ model. At seven OPTAIN case studies, field-scale modelling is applied using the SWAP model. A Modelling Protocol has been develope...

Current databases of soil hydraulic properties (SHPs) have typically been used to develop pedotransfer functions (PTFs) to estimate water retention [θ(h)] assuming a unimodal pore‐size distribution. However, natural soils often show the presence of bimodal to multimodal pore‐size distributions. Here, we used three widely spread databases for PTF de...

Water resources observation and modelling are essential to better understand hydrological processes and improve water resource management. However, the reliability of hydrological simulation is strongly controlled by the quality and type of field observations used for the calibration and validation processes. Therefore, it is critical to develop pr...

Soil moisture (SM) is an essential element in the hydrological cycle influencing land-atmosphere interactions and rainfall-runoff processes. Quantification of the spatial and temporal behaviour of SM at field scale is vital for understanding water availability in agriculture, ecosystems research, river basin hydrology and water resources management...

The inherent biases of different long-term gridded surface soil moisture (SSM) products, unconstrained by the in situ observations, implies different spatio-temporal patterns. In this study, the Random Forest (RF) model was trained to predict SSM from relevant land surface feature variables (i.e., land surface temperature, vegetation indices, soil...

The OPTAIN project aims to identify efficient measures for the retention and reuse of water and nutrients (NSWRM - Natural/Small Water Retention Measures) in small agricultural catchments based on empirical data and scale-adapted integrated modelling approaches. Task 4.1 of the project focused on the analysis of local conditions that are important...

Study region Europe. A total of 660, 522, and 4940 soil samples belonging to GRIZZLY, HYPRES, and EU-HYDI databases, respectively, were used for parametric evaluation. Study focus The soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity functions are crucial input information for land surface models. Determining these functions by using direct methods...

We analysed standards for the common working environment (CWE) and established a platform for project partners' harmonised reporting of project outputs. The results of OPTAINs work packages addressing specific issues of the project (actor platform, measures and indicators, data mining, modelling, optimisation) are assimilated in the following way:...

Gridded model assessments require at least one climatic and one soil database for carrying out the simulations. There are several parallel soil and climate database development projects that provide sufficient, albeit considerably different, observation based input data for crop model based impact studies. The input database related uncertainty of...

Water infiltration rate (WIR) into the soil profile was investigated through a comprehensive study harnessing spectral information of the soil surface. As soil spectroscopy provides invaluable information on soil attributes, and as WIR is a soil surface-dependent property, field spectroscopy may model WIR better than traditional laboratory spectral...

Soil moisture (SM) is an essential element in the hydrological cycle influencing land-atmosphere interactions and rainfall-runoff processes. High-resolution mapping of SM at field scale is vital for understanding spatial and temporal behavior of water availability in agriculture. Unmanned Arial Systems (UAS) offer an extraordinary opportunity to br...

Advising farmers on the best agricultural management practices (AMP) to be adopted in order to Sustain agricultural productivity while improving soil quality is mandatory to assure future food production. Some promising AMPs have been suggested over the time to prevent soil degradation. These practices have been randomly adopted by farmers but whic...

Supplement

Soil hydraulic properties are often derived indirectly, i.e. computed from easily available soil properties with pedotransfer functions (PTFs), when those are needed for catchment, regional or continental scale applications. When predicted soil hydraulic parameters are used for the modelling of the state and flux of water in soils, uncertainty of t...

The euptf2 package provides pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for the prediction of hydraulic properties in European soils. The PTFs were trained and validated on subsets of the European Hydropedological Data Inventory (Weynants et al., 2013, EU-HYDI). The methodology and the results are published in the Journal Geoscientific Model Development (Szabó e...

Background: Despite of the importance of soils in agronomy, to date no comprehensive assessment of cropping in Europe has been performed from the viewpoint of the soil variability and its relationship to cropping patterns. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we studied the cropping patterns in different soils of European climate zones with regard...

The past decades have seen rapid advancements in space-based monitoring of essential water cycle variables, providing products related to precipitation, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture, often at tens of kilometer scales. Whilst these data effectively characterize water cycle variability at regional to global scales, they are less suitable for...

Soil is an essential component in the environment and is vital for food security. It provides ecosystem services, filters water, supplies nutrients to plants, provides us with food, stores carbon, regulates greenhouse gas emissions and it affects our climate. Traditional soil survey methodologies are complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. Visi...

Quantification of the spatial and temporal behavior of soil moisture is vital for understanding water availability in agriculture, ecosystems research, river basin hydrology, and water resources management. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) offer great potential in monitoring this parameter at a sub-meter level and at a relatively low cost. The standar...

Abstract. Soil hydraulic properties are often derived indirectly, i.e. computed from easily available soil properties with pedotransfer functions (PTFs), when those are needed for catchment, regional or continental scale applications. When predicted soil hydraulic parameters are used for the modelling of the state and flux of water in soils, uncert...

The intensification of agricultural practices to increase food and feed outputs is a pressing challenge causing deterioration of soil quality and soil functions. Such a challenge demands provision of empirical evidence to provide context‐sensitive guidance on agricultural management practices (AMPs) that may enhance soil quality. The objectives of...

This repository includes the R scripts used to derive the updated European prediction algorithms to compute soil hydraulic parameters from easily available soil properties, aka pedotransfer functions (PTFs).

The intensification of agricultural practices to increase food and feed outputs is a pressing challenge causing deterioration of soil quality and soil functions. Such challenge demands provision of empirical evidence to provide context-sensitive guidance on agricultural management practices (AMPs) that may enhance soil quality. The objectives of th...

Soil hydraulic properties are often derived indirectly, i.e. computed from easily available soil properties with pedotransfer functions (PTFs), when those are needed for catchment, regional or continental scale applications. When predicted soil hydraulic parameters are used for the modelling of the state and flux of water in soils, uncertainty of t...

The EU Water-JPI project titled “An integrative information aqueduct to close the gaps between global satellite observation of water cycle and local sustainable management of water resources – iAQUEDUCT” aims primarily at closing the gaps between remote observations of water cycle and local needs of information for sustainable management of water r...

The process-based hydrological modeling has a growing data need, and it’s especially hard to access high-resolution soil hydraulic parameters. We’ve tested the reliability of a currently implemented 3D soil-hydraulic database at the soil profile level. Calculations with Hydrus-1D were carried out at three monitored spots of Lake Balaton’s watershed...

There are global aspirations to harmonize soil particle-size distribution data measured by the laser diffraction method and by traditional sedimentation techniques, e.g. sieve-pipette methods. The need has arisen therefore to build up a database, containing particle-size distribution values measured by the sieving and pipette method according to th...

This is a web interface available from https://ptfinterface.rissac.hu to predict soil hydraulic parameters from easily available soil properties. The prediction algorithms (pedotransfer functions: PTFs) have been derived on the European Hydropedological Data Inventory (EU-HYDI) (Weynants et al., 2013). Please find further information about the pred...

Spatial 3-D information on soil hydraulic properties for areas larger than plot scale is usually derived using indirect methods such as pedotransfer functions (PTFs) due to the lack of measured information on them. PTFs describe the relationship between the desired soil hydraulic parameter and easily available soil properties based on a soil hydrau...

The input data requirement of eco-hydrological models poses a growing challenge. Among the various input data the bottleneck seems to be the high-resolution quantification of soil hydraulic parameters. Recognising the situation, novel soil- and soil-hydrologic databases (e.g. MARTHA, DOSoReMI, Lucas, EU-SoilHydroGrids) were recently developed with...

Spatial 3D information on soil hydraulic properties for areas larger than plot scale are usually derived with indirect methods due to lacking measured information on those. Soil hydraulic properties are calculated with applying pedotransfer functions (PTFs) – which describe the relationship between the desired soil hydraulic parameter and easily av...

iSQAPER project - Interactive Soil Quality Assessment in Europe and China for Agricultural Productivity and Environmental Resilience - aims to develop an app to advise farmers on selecting the best Agriculture Management Practice (AMPs) to improve soil quality. For this purpose, a soil quality index has to be developed to account for the changes in...

In this paper, we present and analyze a novel global database of soil infiltration measurements, the Soil Water Infiltration Global (SWIG) database. In total, 5023 infiltration curves were collected across all continents in the SWIG database. These data were either provided and quality checked by the scientists who performed the experiments or they...

In this paper, we present and analyze a global database of soil infiltration measurements, the Soil Water Infiltration Global (SWIG) database, for the first time. In total, 5023 infiltration curves were collected across all continents in the SWIG database. These data were either provided and quality checked by the scientists who performed the exper...

Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems; enhancing the understanding of hydrological processes; optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources; and assessing, forecasting, and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data co...

Download Abstract In this paper, we present and analyze a global database of soil infiltration measurements, the Soil Water Infiltration Global (SWIG) database, for the first time. In total, 5023 infiltration curves were collected across all continents in the SWIG database. These data were either provided and quality checked by the scientists who...

Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems, enhancing the understanding hydrological processes, optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources, and assessing, forecasting and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data collec...

The particle size distribution (PSD) values obtained for a soil database representing the main Hungarian soil types using the Hungarian standard (MSZ-08-0205-78) and the international standard (ISO/DIS 11277:1994) were compared with the pipette method. The relationship between these PSDs and other physical soil characteristics (upper limit of plast...

Soil, through its various functions, plays a vital role in the Earth’s ecosystems and provides multiple ecosystem services to humanity. Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) are simple to complex knowledge rules that relate available soil information to soil properties and variables that are needed to parameterize soil processes. In this paper, we review t...

The objective of this study was to develop pedotransfer functions ( PTF s) for converting soil particle‐size distribution ( PSD ) data from the laser diffraction method ( LDM ) to the classical sieve–pipette method ( SPM ) for use on a wide range of temperate soil types. Four hundred soil samples, representative of E uropean soil types and climate...

Soil hydraulic properties are required in various modelling schemes. We propose a consistent spatial soil hydraulic database at 7 soil depths up to 2 m calculated for Europe based on SoilGrids250m and 1 km datasets and pedotransfer functions trained on the European Hydropedological Data Inventory (EU-HYDI). Saturated water content, water content at...

The growing world population poses a major challenge to global agricultural food and feed production through the pressure to increase agricultural outputs either by increasing the land area dedicated to agriculture or by productivity increases. Whether in developed or developing regions, agricultural intensification based on conventional approaches...

The aim of our research work was to study the role of the oil radish catch crop (Raphanus sativus var oleiformis Pers) as second crop or stubble crop for green manuring in winter wheat-winter barley-maize crop rotation. The oil radish was grown after the harvest of winter barley in the crop sequence. The green biomass (t ha-1), nitrogen (N) content...

Parameters governing the retention and movement of water and chemicals in soils are notorious for the difficulties and high labor costs involved in measuring them. Often, there is a need to resort to estimating these parameters from other, more readily available data, using pedotransfer relationships. This work is a mini-review that focuses on tren...

Water storage and flow in soils are highly dependent on soil structure, which strongly determines soil porosity. However pore size distribution can be derived from soil water retention curve (SWRC). Structural characteristics of cultivated arable fields (693 soil profiles, 1773 samples) and soils covered by treated forest stands (137 soil profiles,...

A new generation of hydraulic pedotransfer functions for Europe.

A range of continental-scale soil datasets exists in Europe with different spatial representation and based on different principles. We developed comprehensive pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for applications principally on spatial datasets with continental coverage. The PTF development included the prediction of soil water retention at various matri...

Relationship between easily available soil properties and soil water retention at given matric potentials were analysed on brown forest soils, chernozems and meadow soils of Hungarian Detailed Soil Hydrophysical Database (Hungarian acronym: MARTHA). We studied the influence of soil properties displayed on the 1:10000 scale Hungarian soil maps on so...

In the frame of the Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey sampling of topsoil was carried out on around 22,000 points in 25 EU Member States in 2009 and in additional 2 Member States in 2012. Besides other basic soil properties soil phosphorus (P) content of the samples were also measured in a single laboratory in both years. Based on the results o...

There is a common need for reliable hydropedological information in Europe. In the last decades research institutes, universities and government agencies have developed local, regional and national datasets containing soil physical, chemical, hydrological and taxonomic information often combined with land use and landform data. A hydrological datab...