Hydraulic properties are often used to model soil water transfer and are good indicator of soil health but few data exist in forest context and even less on compacted soils. The use of permanent corridors of circulation during timber harvest requires the acquisition of soil data in order to predict their trafficability. The dataset is composed of 297 Beerkan infiltration experiments, bulk density and initial water content measured on undisturbed soil (control treatment) and compacted soil (trafficked treatment) of 13 forest plots located in the North-East of France and completed by 3 other plots located in the south of France. The hydraulic properties were determined with de Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameter (BEST) method (Lassabatère et al., 2006). BEST uses the van Genuchten formulation (Van Genuchten, 1980) with the Burdine condition (Burdine et al., 1953) to describe the water retention and the Brooks and Corey formulation (Brooks and Corey, 1964) to describe the hydraulic conductivity. The scale parameters are estimated from the cumulative infiltration curve by fitting the observations to the analytical models developed by Haverkamp et al., (1994) using three different algorithms. The shape parameters are estimated from the size particle distribution.

The dataset provides new data for researchers interesting for developing and validating pedotransfer functions or infiltration models and also for land uses or management researches.

The data base is made of four different tables. The first table (1_soil_characteristics) contains the characteristics of the soil at 3 different depths that is 0-10 cm, 15-25 cm and 30-40 cm per plot and treatment. Soil characteristics corresponds to the 5 fractions particle size distribution, the organic matter content and the pH in water. The second table (2_soil_sampling) contains soil sampling measured at each infiltration experiment. It concerns the bulk density and the initial and final water content measured respectively at the beginning and the end of the infiltration experiments. The third table (3_cumulative_infiltrations) contains the measured infiltration curves. Cumulative time and water height are done per plot x depth x treatment x replicates. The fourth table (4_hydraulic_parameters) contains the hydraulic parameters, and those necessary to the calculation, estimated by the 3 BEST algorithms and the relative error of the fit.