UBCO professor says systematic approach to forest and water supply management is key

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In recognition of World Water Day, new research from UBC Okanagan reveals that a systematic approach to forest and water supply research may improve assessment and understandings of the connections between the two.

According to eco-hydrologist Dr. Adam Wei, healthy forests are crucial for providing a clean and stable water supply.

Forests in watersheds act as natural reservoirs by releasing and purifying water, this occurs by slowing erosion and delaying its release into streams. However, forests are changing due to human activity and this is having an impact on the forests’ interaction with hydrological processes.

Dr. Wei is the Forest Renewal BC’s chair of watershed research and management, a professor of earth, environmental and geographic sciences in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science and study co-author.

According to him, activities such as logging, deforestation, planting new forests on previously bare land, agriculture and urbanization are contributing to the changing of forest landscapes worldwide.

“The notion that humans have left enormous, often negative, footprints on the natural world isn’t new,” he says. “It’s why the term Anthropocene was created to describe these phenomena. But now we need to acknowledge where we’re at and figure out a way to fix what’s broken.”

But humans aren’t the only things to blame.

Natural disturbances also play a role including insect infestations and wildfires. This is why Dr. Wei is studying current forest-water research and management practices with a goal of identifying the gaps and finding a new approach at watersheds, which can reflect numerous variables and interactions.

“We were looking at the impacts of deforestation on annual streamflow—and though we were able to draw the conclusion that deforestation increased it, the variations between studies were large, with increases between less than one per cent to nearly 600 per cent,” he explains.

“We concluded this was due to when water in the soil and on plants evaporates due to a loss of forest cover. But the amount lost ranged from less than two per cent to 100 per cent—that’s a huge difference that can be attributed to scale, type and severity of forest disturbance, as well as climate and location of watershed properties. There are so many variables that need to be taken into account, and not doing so can result in contradictory research conclusions.”

Dr. Wei says future research and management approaches must be systematic in order to limit disparities.

“Implementing a systematic approach to all forest-water research will reduce the likelihood of procuring misleading assessment, which in turn will give us a better chance to solve some of the problems we’ve created,” says Dr. Wei.

This study, published in Science, was conducted by Dr. Wei, and his then-graduate student Dr. Mingfang Zhang, with support from the China National Science Foundation.