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Water sustainability and watershed storage

Nature Sustainability volume 1, pages 378–379 (2018)Cite this article

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The paired watershed approach is the most popular tool for quantifying the effects of forest watershed management on water sustainability. But this approach does not often address the critical factor of water stored in the landscape. Future work needs to quantify storage in paired watershed studies to inform sustainable water management.

Paired watershed studies — where one watershed serves as a reference, while the adjacent watersheds are treated by various forest management approaches (for example, forest harvesting, road construction, afforestation) — have been the standard approach for over 100 years3 for quantifying the effects of forest cover change on streamflow. The paired watershed approach quantifies simply the precipitation inputs and streamflow outputs and uses before–after statistical approaches to quantify change. There are now more than 250 papers from at least 150 paired watersheds around the world, focused mainly on forest harvesting effects on headwater annual water yield.

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Fig. 1: Old-growth forest clearcut in the Gordon River Valley near Port Renfrew, British Columbia.

T. J. Watt, Ancient Forest Alliance.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Savenije and S. Kampf for useful comments that improved the final version of this Comment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Global Institute for Water Security, School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

    J. J. McDonnell

  2. School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Ludong University, Yantai, China

    J. J. McDonnell

  3. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    J. J. McDonnell

  4. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    J. Evaristo

  5. College of Science and Mathematics, University of the Philippines Mindanao, Davao City, Philippines

    J. Evaristo

  6. College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China

    J. Evaristo

  7. Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    K. D. Bladon, T. Maness & C. Segura

  8. School of the Environment, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

    J. Buttle

  9. School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon Saskatchewan, Canada

    I. F. Creed

  10. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA

    S. F. Dymond

  11. Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Corvallis, OR, USA

    G. Grant

  12. Faculty of Forest Sciences and Natural Resources, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    A. Iroume

  13. Warnell School of Forest Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    C. R. Jackson

  14. Geography, College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    J. A. Jones

  15. Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and Virginia Water Resources Research Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    K. J. McGuire

  16. Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

    D. F. Scott

  17. Sustainability Research Centre, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Queensland, Australia

    R. C. Sidle

  18. Bren School, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    C. Tague

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Correspondence to J. J. McDonnell.

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McDonnell, J.J., Evaristo, J., Bladon, K.D. et al. Water sustainability and watershed storage. Nat Sustain 1, 378–379 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0099-8

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