A systematic perspective for understanding complex forest-water nexus: consistency, variations, sensitivity and resilience
Forests as natural reservoirs and filters can store, release, and purify water through their interactions with hydrological processes. Forest-water nexus is complex, and highly variable across both space and time, especially under global environmental changes. There are always debates on forest-water relationships. For example, whether forestation decrease streamflow or not? Thus, we need a systematic perspective to understand complex forest-water nexus. In this talk, we will firstly provide background information regarding global forest dynamics and historical debates on forest-water relationships. Then we will introduce a systematic framework to understand complex forest-water nexus. We will focus on addressing two questions. What are relationships between forest and water at a watershed scale? Can these relationships be predicted by a generalized simple model? To answer these questions, we will then discuss relationships between forest change and annual mean flow as an example. The talk will provide facts about consistency and variations in watershed-scale forest-water relationships based on a global metadata analysis and demonstrate how to use ecohydrological sensitivity and watershed resilience to understand consistent and variable forest-water nexus through case studies in China and Canada. At last, the talk will provide suggestions for future studies to understand complex forest-water nexus.
Due to time zone conflicts between Arizona and Chengdu China we will have two options to attend seminar on Monday:
1) 8:30-9:30 am MST on a live zoom call with Dr. Zhang
2) A streamed rebroadcast of the earlier seminar during our regular 11:30-12:30 MST meeting time.