Assessing watershed-scale impacts of best management practices and elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations on water yield

Abstract

Changes in water yield are influenced by many intersecting biophysical elements, including climate, on-land best management practices, and landcover. Large-scale reductions in water yield may present a significant threat to water supplies globally. Many of these intersecting factors are intercorrelated and confounded, making it challenging to separate the factors' individual contributions to shaping local streamflow dynamics. Comprehensive hydrological models constructed based on a well-established understanding of biophysical processes are often employed to address these matters. However, these models rarely incorporate all relevant factors influencing local hydrological processes, due to the reliance of these models on the latest, albeit limited, state-of-the-art research. For instance, complexities inherent in watershed hydrology, which involve multilayered interactions among potentially many biophysical factors, leave the direct analysis of subtle impacts on water yields measured in-situ largely intractable. Therefore, we propose an innovative approach to assess impacts of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and flow diversion terraces (FDTs) on stream discharge rates at the watershed scale. Initially, we use a comprehensive hydrological model to account for the impacts of major climatic and landuse/landcover factors on changes in field-acquired measurements of water yield. Next, we employ conventional and advanced statistical methods to decompose the residuals of model predictions to facilitate the identification of subtle influences promoted by increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the application of FDTs in an agriculture-dominated watershed. Through this innovative approach, we find that FDTs contributed to a watershed-wide, net water-yield reduction of 188.0 mm (or 28.9 %) from 1992 to 2014. Ongoing increases in ambient CO2 concentrations, which are responsible for an overall reduction in a watershed-level assessment of stomatal conductance, have led to a minor increase in stream discharge rates during the same 23-year period, i.e., 0.45 mm of water yield per year, or 1.6 % overall. Streamflow reductions explicitly caused by regional warming in the area alone, on account of increased evapotranspiration, may be overestimated due to the opposing, synergistic effects on water yield associated with CO2-enrichment of the lower atmosphere and the annual application of FDTs.