1,2,3,2,4,5,3,6,2,7,1- 1Department of Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- 2Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 3School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- 4Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- 5Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden
- 6Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 7Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Land cover affects the runoff response of catchments. However, such land-cover effects remain difficult to decipher because experimental studies reveal site-specific effects, while large-sample analyses are often confounded by other factors, such as climate gradients that obscure the role of land cover. Empirical methods that do not consider differences in antecedent wetness may overestimate runoff responses in forested catchments due to their typically humid climate. We quantify runoff responses to a unit precipitation input and examine how this varies across 252 U.S. catchments with different land covers. For comparable antecedent wetness conditions, peak runoff responses decline as forest cover increases, with peaks in forested catchments being 16-63% lower than those in catchments dominated by cropland or grassland. By accounting for climate-driven differences among sites, our approach isolates the influences of forest cover on reducing peak flows, which is often masked by climate in large-sample analyses.
How to cite: Liu, S., Kirchner, J. W., Slater, L. J., Floriancic, M. G., van Meerveld, I., and Berghuijs, W. R.: Forest impacts on peak runoff revealed by accounting for the effects of climate, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-23084, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-23084, 2026.
