Surface soil structure is sensitive to natural and anthropogenic impacts that alter soil hydraulic properties (SHP). These alterations have distinct consequences on the water cycle. In this review, we summarized published findings on the quantitative effects of different agricultural management practices on SHP and the subsequent response of the water balance components. Generally, immediately after tillage, soils show a high abundance of large pores, which are temporally unstable and collapse due to environmental factors like rainfall. Nevertheless, most hydrological modeling studies consider SHP as temporally constant when predicting the flow of water and solutes in the atmosphere-plant-soil system. There have been some developments in mathematical approaches to capture the temporal dynamics of soil pore space. We applied one such pore evolution model to two datasets to evaluate its suitability to predict soil pore space dynamics after disturbance. Lack of knowledge on how dispersion of pore size distribution behaves after tillage may have led to over-estimation of some values predicted by the model. Nevertheless, we found that the model predicted the evolution of soil pore space reasonably well (r² > 0.80 in most cases). The limiting factor to efficiently calibrate and apply such modeling tools is not in the theoretical part but rather the lack of adequate soil structural and hydrologic data.

Soil hydraulic properties (SHPs), particularly soil water retention capacity and hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated soils, are among the key properties that determine the hydrological functioning of terrestrial systems. Some large collections of SHPs, such as the UNSODA and HYPRES databases, have already existed for more than 2 decades. They have provided an essential basis for many studies related to the critical zone. Today, sample-based SHPs can be determined in a wider saturation range and with higher resolution by combining some recently developed laboratory methods. We provide 572 high-quality SHP data sets from undisturbed, mostly central European samples covering a wide range of soil texture, bulk density and organic carbon content. A consistent and rigorous quality filtering ensures that only trustworthy data sets are included. The data collection contains (i) SHP data, which consist of soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity data, determined by the evaporation method and supplemented by retention data obtained by the dewpoint method and saturated conductivity measurements; (ii) basic soil data, which consist of particle size distribution determined by sedimentation analysis and wet sieving, bulk density and organic carbon content; and (iii) metadata, which include the coordinates of the sampling locations. In addition, for each data set, we provide soil hydraulic parameters for the widely used van Genuchten–Mualem model and for the more advanced Peters–Durner–Iden model. The data were originally collected to develop and test SHP models and associated pedotransfer functions. However, we expect that they will be very valuable for various other purposes such as simulation studies or correlation analyses of different soil properties to study their causal relationships. The data are available at https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2023.012 (Hohenbrink et al., 2023).