Free access to functioning SWAT application of the three river basins

SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool, https://swat.tamu.edu ) 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 ready applications, in which all the numerous parameters have already been determined for similar areas than that of the user’s own target area. The Bonus Return project produced 3 baseline (no scenarios with e.g. mitigation measures or BMPs) SWAT applications with different parameter combinations for the project’s case study catchments in Finland (Vantaanjoki), Sweden (Fyrisån) and Poland (Slupia). So, the user can start making his/her own scenarios for these areas on top of the baseline applications. As a new contribution to the Syke’s open data, the three SWAT applications of Bonus Return project were compressed into zip-files and stored in the open data repository of the Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), from where anyone with knowledge on SWAT can download the files and start making his/her own runs, simulations and scenarios.