Authors: Jari Koskiaho (SYKE), Mikolaj Piniewski (WULS) & Sirkka Tattari (SYKE)
SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) was developed to predict the impacts of land management practices on hydrological regimes and the loading of surface waters in complex watersheds over long periods of time. Building a SWAT application is a laborious process. It is of great help to other modelers (researchers and practitioners) if applications that are ready to use exist, in which all the numerous parameters have already been determined for similar areas other than those of the user’s own target area.
The BONUS RETURN project produced three baseline SWAT applications with different parameter combinations for the project’s case study catchments in Finland (Vantaanjoki), Sweden (Fyrisån) and Poland (Slupia). This enables the user to not only utilize the parameterization of the case study applications in his or her similar target area, but to also start making his or her own scenarios for these areas on top of the baseline applications of the BONUS RETURN case study catchments.
As a new contribution to the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE)’s open data, the three SWAT applications in BONUS RETURN were compressed into zip-files and stored in the open data repository of the Finnish Environment Institute. Anyone with knowledge on SWAT can download the files and start making his or her own runs, simulations and scenarios. To find a SWAT application in the public SYKE Research Data Service, the user can either scroll or type e.g. “SWAT” into the search box, or use this direct link.
