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Article summary:
1. This article examines the hydrologic response to forest cover loss in 50 catchments across eight nations and seven climate regions.
2. The authors found that the runoff response to deforestation is related to the seasonal alignment of precipitation peaks and tree phenology, as well as mean annual temperature (MAT) and phase shift between precipitation and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) peaks.
3. The results suggest that strategic implementation of native forest conservation or restoration can help mitigate the effects of global climate change and regional or local surface runoff.
Article analysis:
The article “Alignment of tree phenology and climate seasonality influences the runoff response to forest cover loss” by James Knighton et al is a comprehensive study on the hydrologic responses to deforestation in 50 catchments across eight nations and seven climate regions. The authors used hierarchical clustering to group significant and non-significant runoff responses, which was effective in identifying a significant increase in RR following forest loss.
The article is generally reliable, with its findings supported by prior studies on forest cover change, such as those conducted in tropical regions (Peña-Arancibia et al 2019, Pontes et al 2019), Eastern Africa (Guzha et al 2018), the Andes (Bonnesoeur et al 2019), Mediterranean regions of Europe (Preti et al 2011, Belmar et al 2018) and Northeastern US (Knighton et al 2019). Furthermore, the authors used a variety of data sources for their analysis, including daily discharge records from USGS (2019), Environment Canada (2020), Levy (2017), Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) (2020), global 0.5 degree daily precipitation from Xie et al (2010) and Chen and Knutson (2008), global average 0.5 degree annual Potential EvapoTranspiration estimates from Zomer et al (2008), global monthly Enhanced Vegetation Index estimates from Weiss et al (2014).
However, there are some potential biases in this article that should be noted. For example, while the authors did use Landsat-8 imagery for each catchment to confirm large regions of forest loss, they did not provide any information about how they determined what constituted a “large region” or how they accounted for potential misclassification errors due to resolution issues with satellite imagery. Additionally, while the authors did discuss possible explanations for heterogeneous hydrologic responses among catchments such as differences in catchment