Global pattern for the effect of climate and land cover on water yield
By Guoyi Zhou, Xiaohua Wei, Xiuzhi Chen, P. Zhou, Xiao-dong Liu, Yin Xiao, G. Sun, D. Scott, Shuyidan Zhou, Liusheng Han and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2015
713 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Research results on the effects of land cover change on water resources vary greatly and the topic remains controversial. Here we use published data worldwide to examine the validity of Fuh’s equation, which relates annual water yield (R) to a wetness index (precipitation/potential evapotranspiration; P/PET) and watershed characteristics (m). We identify two critical values at P/PET=1 and m=2. m plays a more important role than P/PET when m<2, and a lesser role when m>2. When P/PET<1, the relative water yield (R/P) is more responsive to changes in m than it is when P/PET>1, suggesting that any land cover changes in non-humid regions (P/PET<1) or in watersheds of low water retention capacity (m<2) can lead to greater hydrological responses. m significantly correlates with forest coverage, watershed slope and watershed area. This global pattern has far-reaching significance in studying and managing hydrological responses to land cover and climate changes. The effects of forests on water yield are uncertain, with some studies indicating that increased evapotranspiration reduces water yield and other showing that forests increase it. Here, the authors analyse published data to settle this debate, finding that afforestation has a positive effect on water yield.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15916dbf26b3e07c36647a92ecf0a107a46e1c4f
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Understanding the budyko equation (2017, background): “[8] conclude that 1 < w < 2, corresponding to low green water storage, corresponds to a lesser effect of climate on runoff relative to catchment effects.”
- Recent trends in vegetation greenness in China significantly altered annual evapotranspiration and water yield (2016, background): “A recent global-scale synthesis study indicated that land cover changes can lead to greater hydrological responses in non-humid regions or in watersheds of low water retention capacity (Zhou et al 2015).”
- Estimation of the Budyko model parameter for small basins in China (2019, background): “The parameter ω represents the integrated effects of catchment attributes (such as climate, vegetation cover, soil properties, and catchment topography) and human activities on P partitioning (Tang & Wang, 2017; Wang et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2001; Zhou et al., 2015).”