TY - JOUR
T1 - Streamflow response to forest management
AU - Kirchner, James W.
AU - Berghuijs, Wouter R.
AU - Allen, Scott T.
AU - Hrachowitz, Markus
AU - Hut, Rolf
AU - Rizzo, D.M.
N1 - Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Forests play a key part in the water cycle, so both planting and removing forests can affect streamflow. In a recent Article1, Evaristo and McDonnell used a gradient-boosted-tree model to conclude that streamflow response to forest removal is predominantly controlled by the potential water storage in the landscape, and that removing the world’s forests would contribute an additional 34,098 km3 yr−1 to streamflow worldwide, nearly doubling global river flow. Here we report several problems with Evaristo and McDonnell’s1 database, their model, and the extrapolation of their results to the continental and global scale. The main results of the paper1 remain unsubstantiated, because they rely on a database with multiple errors and a model that fails validation tests.
AB - Forests play a key part in the water cycle, so both planting and removing forests can affect streamflow. In a recent Article1, Evaristo and McDonnell used a gradient-boosted-tree model to conclude that streamflow response to forest removal is predominantly controlled by the potential water storage in the landscape, and that removing the world’s forests would contribute an additional 34,098 km3 yr−1 to streamflow worldwide, nearly doubling global river flow. Here we report several problems with Evaristo and McDonnell’s1 database, their model, and the extrapolation of their results to the continental and global scale. The main results of the paper1 remain unsubstantiated, because they rely on a database with multiple errors and a model that fails validation tests.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079335980&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41586-020-1940-6
DO - 10.1038/s41586-020-1940-6
M3 - Comment/Letter to the editor
C2 - 32051605
SN - 0028-0836
VL - 578
SP - E12-E15
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
IS - 7794
ER -