What is it about?
Quantifying the impacts of land use and cover change on catchment hydrology is essential but still problematic, especially because of a scarcity of relevant observations and the difficulty of regionalizing any existing observations. This study uses a network of paired catchments to increase the detectability of land-use signals in a regionalization exercise. We found an improved explanatory capacity of the regional models attributed to to the pairwise monitoring setup and, as such, it may be a useful strategy to optimize data collection especially in data-scarce regions.
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Why is it important?
Our model is effectively a regionalization procedure that is thought to be more powerful than pair-wise comparisons and evidence-based approaches separately. We find that identifying informative, non-redundant streamflow characteristics that describe most of the watershed hydrological response indeed allows capturing the signals of land-use impact on natural ecosystems. Using regionalized estimations may provide relevant knowledge to evaluate the hydrological impact of watershed management practices and improve decision-making in the absence of data.
Perspectives
I am convinced of this manuscript’s appropriateness for a wide readership including those interested in hydrology, environmental sciences, water engineering, and water resources management that use diverse observational, experimental, theoretical, analytical, and data-driven approaches. The research builds upon several years of extensive study, as part of the Regional Initiative for Hydrological Monitoring of Andean Ecosystems (iMHEA), through a participatory monitoring approach. The significant improvement in regional model performance and predictability capacity suggests that it is possible to separate impacts from natural variability, and thus to regionalize them.
Mr Boris F Ochoa-Tocachi
Imperial College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Regionalization of land-use impacts on streamflow using a network of paired catchments, Water Resources Research, September 2016, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1002/2016wr018596.
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