Responses of terrestrial water cycle components to afforestation within and around the Yellow River basin

Abstract

Reforestation has attracted worldwide attention because of its multiple environmental benefits, but its impact on water resources is complicated and still controversial. In this study, the authors conducted numerical experiments within and around the Yellow River basin under the Grain-for-Green project using the Weather Research and Forecasting model. The results showed that the terrestrial water cycle process was sensitive to land use/cover change in the study region. Under the increase of mixed forests within and below the basin, the basin-averaged precipitation and evaporation increased by 223.17 and 223.88 mm respectively, but the surface runoff decreased by 2.22 mm from 2006 to 2010. In other words, the forest-induced increase in evaporation exceeded that of precipitation along with decreased surface runoff. Importantly, the afforestation effects on water resources seemed to enhance with time, and the effects of the same vegetation change were different in dry and wet years with different precipitation amounts (i.e. different atmospheric circulation background). It should be noted that it is difficult to obtain one product that can explicitly reflect the spatial distribution of actual land cover change promoted by the Grain-for-Green project in the Yellow River basin, which is an important obstacle to clearly identify the reforestation impacts. A land cover dataset derived from advantages of multiple sets of data therefore needs to be proposed.

Keywords

• afforestation
• precipitation
• evaporation
• runoff
• yellow river basin