The Influence of Historical and Potential Future Deforestation on The
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Journal of Hydrology 369 (2009) 165–174 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Hydrology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol The influence of historical and potential future deforestation on the stream flow of the Amazon River – Land surface processes and atmospheric feedbacks Michael T. Coe a,*, Marcos H. Costa b, Britaldo S. Soares-Filho c a The Woods Hole Research Center, 149 Woods Hole Rd., Falmouth, MA 02540, USA b The Federal University of Viçosa, Viçosa, MG, 36570-000, Brazil c The Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil article info summary Article history: In this study, results from two sets of numerical simulations are evaluated and presented; one with the Received 18 June 2008 land surface model IBIS forced with prescribed climate and another with the fully coupled atmospheric Received in revised form 27 October 2008 general circulation and land surface model CCM3-IBIS. The results illustrate the influence of historical and Accepted 15 February 2009 potential future deforestation on local evapotranspiration and discharge of the Amazon River system with and without atmospheric feedbacks and clarify a few important points about the impact of defor- This manuscript was handled by K. estation on the Amazon River. In the absence of a continental scale precipitation change, large-scale Georgakakos, Editor-in-Chief, with the deforestation can have a significant impact on large river systems and appears to have already done so assistance of Phillip Arkin, Associate Editor in the Tocantins and Araguaia Rivers, where discharge has increased 25% with little change in precipita- tion. However, with extensive deforestation (e.g. >30% of the Amazon basin) atmospheric feedbacks, Keywords: brought about by differences in the physical structure of the crops and pasture replacing natural vegeta- Amazon tion, cause water balance changes of the same order of magnitude as the changes due to local land surface Discharge processes, but of opposite sign. Additionally, changes in the water balance caused by atmospheric feed- Numerical models backs are not limited to those basins where deforestation has occurred but are spread unevenly through- Deforestation out the entire Amazon by atmospheric circulation. As a result, changes to discharge and aquatic environments with future deforestation of the Amazon will likely be significant and a complex function of how much vegetation has been removed from that particular watershed and how much has been removed from the entire Amazon Basin. Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Introduction and floods routinely disrupt communication, commerce, econom- ics, health and ecology over wide areas of the watershed (Marengo The Amazon River system provides habitat for one of the et al., 2008a,b). With increasing population and infrastructure world’s most diverse aquatic environments and is central to the within the Amazon, future variability and changes to stream flow existence of millions of people. It provides nearly all, domestic are likely to create more frequent and larger disruptions. and commercial transportation in the region. For example, there Global economic and regional population and development are no roads connecting Manaus, an important industrial city of pressures have resulted in high rates of deforestation in the Amazon about 1.2 million people in the center of the Amazon, with the ma- River basin (Achard et al., 2002; Fearnside and Graça, 2006; Kaim- jor population centers in northeastern and southern Brazil. The riv- owitz et al., 2004) and about 17% of the Amazon basin (excluding er also provides drinking water, livelihood, and protein in the form the Tocantins) has been deforested by 2007, mostly in the eastern of fish to the majority of the population of the Amazon. Addition- and southern portion of the basin (Fearnside, 1993; INPE, 1999, ally, major infrastructure investments are planned for the Amazon 2000; Nepstad et al., 1999; Skole et al., 1994; Skole and Tucker, basin, including hydroelectric dams, mining and industrial devel- 1993)(Fig. 1). Cattle ranching is the single largest use of cleared opment, and waterways for barge traffic (Carvalho et al., 2001; land in the Amazon, covering about 75% of total deforested area Laurance et al., 2001). These social, ecological, and economic actors (Faminow, 1998; Margulis, 2003) and herd size in the Amazon has all depend on a stable Amazon River system. doubled since 1996 from about 15 million to 30 million head Despite the popular view that the Amazon contains a near lim- (Nepstad et al., 2006; Simon and Garagorry, 2005). However, soy- itless supply of water, extreme climate events such as droughts bean production, primarily for export as animal feed to Europe and China (Nepstad et al., 2006), has become more important in the last decade and new land is now being converted directly from * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 508 540 9900; fax: +1 508 540 9700. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.T. Coe). cerrado and forest for soybean production. Recent deforestation 0022-1694/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.02.043 166 M.T. Coe et al. / Journal of Hydrology 369 (2009) 165–174 Fig. 1. Vegetation cover of the Amazon basin with three land covers classes, tropical evergreen forests (green), Cerrado (beige), and agriculture (yellow) shown for potential vegetation (CTL) as reconstructed by Ramankutty and Foley (1998), vegetation distribution of the year 2000 (MOD) as estimated by Eva et al. (2002), and two scenarios for the year 2050 by Soares-Filho et al. (2006) with strong governance of deforestation (GOV) and relatively weak governance (BAU). rates reflect the global demand for Brazilian beef and soybeans with catchment to 17% in the pasture catchment. The second paired about 22,000 km2 deforested each year between 2000 and 2004 experiment compares two 1.2 km2 catchments, Colosso and Açú- (INPE, 2004). Economic conditions and recent trends suggest that Mirim, in Central Amazonia (Trancoso, 2006), concluding that the high rates of Amazonian deforestation for cattle and soybean runoff coefficient increases from 21% in the forest catchment to production will continue well into the future (Alencar et al., 2004; 43% in the pasture catchment. At the large scale, studies in the Carvalho et al., 2001; Kaimowitz et al., 2004; Laurance et al., Tocantins and Araguaia Rivers of eastern Amazonia conclude that 2001; Soares-Filho et al., 2004, 2006). The last 5 months of 2007 rapid land cover changes since 1960 are associated with about a saw a record 7000 km2 of deforestation in the Amazon. 25% increase in the annual mean discharge despite no significant The land surface of the Amazon is coupled to its rivers, streams change in precipitation (Coe et al., 2008; Costa et al., 2003). There- and wetlands, through hydrological processes. Human land cover fore, in eastern Amazonia land cover change appears to have and land use changes influence the quantity of surface water re- already significantly reduced evapotranspiration and increased sources by: Changing how incoming precipitation and radiation runoff and discharge. are partitioned among sensible and latent heat fluxes, runoff, and This reduction in evapotranspiration is a consequence of the river discharge (Bonan et al., 2004; Costa and Foley, 1997; Li land surface processes involved in the exchange of energy and et al., 2007) and altering regional and continental scale precipita- water from the biosphere to the atmosphere. The pastures, with tion patterns (Costa and Foley, 2000; Delire et al., 2001; Dickinson higher albedo, lower leaf area, lower roughness length and shal- and Henderson-Sellers, 1988; Malhi et al., 2008b; Nobre et al., lower roots, usually have a lower evapotranspiration rate than 1991). the forest, particularly during the dry season. Changes in the water and energy balance work at a variety of Global and meso-scale climate model studies indicate, however, time and space scales and the combined influences on the river dis- that once deforestation in the Amazon basin occurs on a very large charge are complex. Observations at micro (<1 km2) or meso scale (>100,000 km2), atmospheric feedbacks may significantly re- (100 s km2) spatial scales in the global tropics and extra-tropics duce regional precipitation. Replacement of forest with higher al- indicate that deforestation reduces evapotranspiration and in- bedo, less water-demanding crops and pastures leads to reduced creases stream flow because of the reduced leaf area index, de- net surface radiation, decreased moisture convergence over the ba- creased root density and depth, and increased soil compaction sin, decreased water recycling, and reduced precipitation (Costa (Bruijnzeel, 1990; Costa, 2005; Sahin and Hall, 1996; Scanlon and Foley, 2000; Dickinson and Henderson-Sellers, 1988; Malhi et al., 2007). Two microscale, paired experiments in Amazonia con- et al., 2008b; Nobre et al., 1991). Recent studies that evaluated firm the results obtained outside of the Amazon. The first paired the effects of partial deforestation on the climate of the region experiment compares two catchments of areas <0.01 km2 in Fazen- (Costa et al., 2007; Sampaio et al., 2007) found that significant da Vitória, eastern Amazonia (Moraes et al., 2006), and found that changes in precipitation occur only after more than 40% of the the ratio of runoff to precipitation increases from 3% in the forest Amazon basin is deforested. M.T. Coe et al. / Journal of Hydrology 369 (2009) 165–174 167 These two processes lead to competing influences on the stream inherent in that data; (2) Understanding the importance of contin- flow, with decreased local evapotranspiration consistent with in- ued and future efforts to reduce deforestation on the local and re- creased discharge and reduced regional precipitation consistent gional health of the Amazon River; continued efforts to reduce with decreased discharge (Costa, 2005; D’Almeida et al., 2006, deforestation can be strengthened by knowledge of the scale of dis- 2007).