Abstract
Water balances in small catchments are widely used in forest science. Since the watershed research at Wagon Wheel Gap (Colorado, USA) in 1910 (Cameron 1928), many other catchments have been instrumented to measure precipitation inputs and runoff outputs. The main goal of this approach is to evaluate the influence of vegetation cover on water yield, both in autocalibrated and in paired catchments. Reviews by Bosch and Hewlett (1982) and Trimble and Weirich (1987) showed the negative relationship between forest cover and water yield in catchments. The same result is obtained when forest manipulations like clear-cutting or revegetation affect the entire catchment (Hibbert 1971; Likens et al. 1977). When deep water losses are negligible because of the underlying lithology, the study of water balances in catchments is the best technique to get accurate estimates of actual evapotranspiration. Water precipitation input and streamflow output also provide the basic data for the estimation of catchment element budgets (Chap. 20).
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Piñol, J., Àvila, A., Escarré, A. (1999). Water Balance in Catchments. In: Rodà, F., Retana, J., Gracia, C.A., Bellot, J. (eds) Ecology of Mediterranean Evergreen Oak Forests. Ecological Studies, vol 137. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58618-7_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58618-7_19
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