Despite their importance, wetland ecosystems protected through the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands are under pressure from climate change and human activities. These drivers are altering water availability in these wetlands, changing water levels or surface extent, in some cases, beyond historical variability. Attribution of the effects of human and climate activities is usually focused on changes within the wetlands or their upstream surface and groundwater inputs. However, the reliance of wetland water availability on upwind atmospheric moisture supply is less understood. Here, we assess the vulnerability of 40 Ramsar wetland basins to precipitation changes caused by land use and hydroclimatic changes occurring in their upwind moisture-supplying regions. We use moisture flows from a Lagrangian tracking model, atmospheric reanalysis data, and historical land use change data to assess and quantify these changes. Our analyses show that historical land use change decreased precipitation and terrestrial moisture recycling in most wetland hydrological basins, accompanied by decreasing surface water availability (precipitation minus evaporation) in some wetlands. The most substantial effects on wetland water availability occurred in the tropical and subtropical regions of Central Europe and Asia. Overall, we found wetlands in Asia and South America to be especially threatened by a combination of land use change-driven effects on runoff, high terrestrial precipitation recycling, and recently decreasing surface water availability. This study stresses the need to incorporate upwind effects of land use changes in the restoration, management and conservation of the world’s wetlands.

A substantial amount of the tropical forests of South America and Africa is generated through moisture recycling (i.e., forest rainfall self-reliance). Thus, deforestation that reduces evaporation and dampens the water cycle can further increase the risk of water-stress-induced forest loss in downwind areas, particularly during water scarce periods. However, few studies have investigated dry period forest rainfall self-reliance over longer records and consistently compared the rainforest moisture recycling in both continents. Here, we analyze dry-season anomalies of moisture recycling for mean-years and dry-years, in the South American (Amazon) and African (Congo) rainforests over the years 1980-2013. We find that, in the dry seasons, the reliance of forest rainfall on their own moisture supply (ρfor) increases by 7% (from a mean annual value of 26% to 28%) in the Amazon and up to 30% (from 28% to 36%) in the Congo. Dry years further amplify dry season ρfor in both regions by 4-5%. In both the Amazon and Congo, dry season amplification of ρfor is strongest in regions with a high mean annual ρfor. In the Amazon, forest rainfall self-reliance has declined over time. At the country scale, dry season ρfor can differ drastically from mean annual ρfor. In for example Bolivia and Gabon, mean annual ρfor is ~30% while dry season ρfor is ~50%. The dry period amplification of forest rainfall self-reliance further highlights the role of forests for sustaining their own resilience, and for maintaining downwind rainfall at both regional and national scales.

The freshwater ecosystems around the world are degrading, such that maintaining environmental flow (EF) in river networks is critical to their preservation. The relationship between streamflow alterations and, respectively, EF violations, and freshwater biodiversity is well established at the scale of stream reaches or small basins (~<100 km²). However, it is unclear if this relationship is robust at larger scales even though there are large-scale initiatives to legalize the EF requirement. Moreover, EFs have been used in assessing a planetary boundary for freshwater. Therefore, this study intends to carry out an exploratory evaluation of the relationship between EF violation and freshwater biodiversity at globally aggregated scales and for freshwater ecoregions. Four EF violation indices (severity, frequency, the probability to shift to violated state, and probability to stay violated) and seven independent freshwater biodiversity indicators (calculated from observed biota data) were used for correlation analysis. No statistically significant negative relationship between EF violation and freshwater biodiversity was found at global or ecoregion scales. While our results thus suggest that streamflow and EF may not be an only determinant of freshwater biodiversity at large scales, they do not preclude the existence of relationships at smaller scales or with more holistic EF methods (e.g., including water temperature, water quality, intermittency, connectivity etc.) or with other biodiversity data or metrics.

Climate change and deforestation influence the rainfall patterns in the tropics, thereby increasing the risk of drought-induced forest-to-savanna transitions. Forest ecosystems respond to these changing environmental conditions by adapting various drought coping strategies driven by different magnitudes of water-stress (i.e., defined here as a deficit in soil water availability inhibiting plant growth due to change in rainfall patterns). A better understanding of forest dynamics in response to the water-stress conditions is, therefore, crucial to determine the rainforest’s present ecohydrological conditions, as well as project a possible rainforest-savanna transition scenario. However, our present understanding of such transitions is entirely based on rainfall, which does not consider the adaptability of vegetation to droughts by utilizing subsoil moisture in a quantifiable metric. Using remote-sensing derived root zone storage capacity (Sr) and tree cover, we analyze the water-stress and drought coping strategies of the rainforest-savanna ecosystems in South America and Africa. The results from our empirical and statistical analysis allows us to classify the ecosystem’s adaptability to droughts into four key classes of drought coping strategies: lowly water-stressed forest (shallow roots, high tree cover), moderately water-stressed forest (investing in Sr, high tree cover), highly water-stressed forest (trade-off between investments in Sr and tree cover) and savanna-grassland regime (competitive rooting strategy, low tree cover). This study concludes that the ecosystems’ responses are primarily focused on allocating carbon in the most efficient way possible to maximize their hydrological benefits. The insights from this study suggest remote sensing-based Sr as an important indicator revealing important subsoil forest dynamics and opens new paths for understanding the ecohydrological state, resilience, and adaptation dynamics of the tropical ecosystems under a rapidly changing climate.

The Budyko framework consists of a curvilinear relationship between the evaporative ratio (i.e., actual evaporation over precipitation) and the aridity index (potential evaporation over precipitation) and defines evaporation’s water and energy limits. A basin’s movement within the Budyko space illustrates its hydroclimatic change and can help identify the main drivers of change. Basins are expected to move along their Budyko curves when only long-term changes in the aridity index drive changes in the evaporative ratio. We hypothesize that the increasing effects of global warming on the hydrological cycle will cause basins to move along their Budyko curves. To test our hypothesis, we quantify the movement in Budyko space of 353 river basins from 1901 to 2100 based on the outputs of nine models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project - Phase 5 (CMIP5). We find that significant increases in potential evaporation due to global warming will lead to basins moving primarily horizontally in Budyko space accompanied by minor changes in the evaporative ratio. However, 37% of the basins will still deviate from their Budyko curve trajectories, with less evaporation than expected by the framework. We elaborate on how land-use change, vegetation changes, or shifts in precipitation or snow to rain ratios can explain these deviations.